CIM-SPL Delivers Simplified Language for Policy-Based Management

PORTLAND, Ore. April 2, 2007 The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards, today announced the public release of the Common Information Model Simplified Policy Language (CIM-SPL) 1.0, providing developers with a streamlined policy language compatible with the underlying information models in CIM. Policy-based management, which allows administrators to define rules and allocate resources, delivers efficiency and provides the foundation for automated systems management in distributed environments, and CIM-SPLs standards-based approach provides cross-platform capabilities for this critical and evolving area.

CIM-SPL delivers the means for specifying "If condition, then action-style policy rules to manage computing resources, using constructs defined by the underlying models of CIM. The design of CIM-SPL is inspired by existing policy languages and models, including a contribution of the autonomic computing expression language (ACEL) from IBM Research and additional enhancements from Cisco Systems. With CIM-SPL, management applications using CIM can add-on the CIM policy engine to automatically control and configure parts of the IT domain.

From storage area network management in the data center to network routing security, policy-based management is playing a lead role in the enterprise and beyond, said Winston Bumpus, president, DMTF. CIM-SPL is a new language that will greatly simplify the process for developers to add policies that can be integrated into end-to-end distributed management using CIM.

The DMTFs CIM-SPL specification is available for download here. The DMTF invites the public to provide feedback on this and other DMTF Preliminary specifications via its Feedback Portal.

About the DMTF
With more than 3,500 active participants representing 39 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF management technologies include the Common Diagnostic Model (CDM) initiative, the Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) initiative, Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) including protocols such as CIM-XML and Web Services for Management (WS-Management) - which are all based on the Common Information Model (CIM). Information about the DMTF technologies and activities can be found at http://www.dmtf.org.