By Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Network World Data Center Newsletter, 04/27/04

The promise of a malleable data center that reconfigures itself automatically to respond to an enterprise’s needs is enticing. The catch is, there’s no universal way to describe a data center. Unless you can describe it, how can you build it? Provisioning, configuration, patching, monitoring and management tools all have individual “views” of data center components and their interdependencies, and these tools communicate via proprietary formats.

Complete article: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/datacenter/2004/0426datacenter1.html