Jump to content

Service Modeling Language

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cem Basman~enwiki (talk | contribs) at 08:09, 2 August 2006 (→External Links). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Service Modeling Language (SML) is an XML-based specification by leading information technology companies that defines a consistent way to express how computer networks, applications, servers and other IT resources are described or modeled so businesses can more easily manage the services that are built on these resources. This enables a hierarchy of IT resource models to be created from reusable building blocks rather than requiring custom descriptions of every service, thus reducing costs and system complexity for customers. SML is currently proposed jointly by BEA Systems, BMC_Software, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC Corporation, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

SML addresses a growing industry need as a result of the numerous methods of representing the same IT resource. Besides being inefficient, the use of different formats leads to two problems. First, because the tools and management applications use different formats, they don’t speak the same language. Therefore the information must be translated, which can lead to the loss or misinterpretation of technical details. Second, the use of different formats may require IT architects to use written descriptions or sketches to convey information about resources. Such descriptions must then be translated into a form that tools and management applications can consume, which is a manual, error-prone process.

SML has two unique properties that make it well-suited for modeling IT resources and services: support for rich constraints and alignment with XML message exchange architectures. SML allows developers to build modeling information for applications, devices and services that can be used during all stages of the application or service life cycle, such as configuration, problem, change and release management. They are also useful for tactical processes such as management of service levels, availability and capacity. The SML specification provides simplicity, integration and compatibility throughout this life cycle for all components of an IT environment.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Service_Modeling_Language&oldid=67204366"