Heavies float data center standard | CNET News.com: "Computing industry heavyweights on Monday announced a plan to create a standardized way for computing resources to 'talk' to each other, a move they say will lower the cost of running corporate data centers.

The initiative calls for the creation of an XML-based standard, called Service Modeling Language (SML), and its adoption in commercial products, including systems management software, hardware, and application development tools.

The companies involved--BEA Systems, BMC Software, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems--published a draft SML specification on Monday and pledged to support it in the future.

The goal of SML is to establish a lingua franca for computing resources--servers, networking gear, applications and the like--to exchange operating information, such as security requirements or performance problems.

The language will allow vendors to create a model that encapsulates and communicates performance information to network monitoring programs, according to its backers. In addition, software developers can use modeling tools to specify the computing resources, such as the number of servers and databases, required to put a newly developed application into use."

tags: packaged payload control standardization scale