A standards-based approach to BSM
As most managers involved in the journey towards ITIL and BSM implementations would agree, the toughest hurdle to cross is an enterprise-wide CMDB implementation. An effective and functioning Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or in ITIL V3 terms, a Service and Asset Configuration management Information system (CMIS), is particularly challenging for several reasons including:
- plethora in variety and complexity of data items to record and support and the challenge in creating a comprehensive data model for the CMDB
- Challenges in maintaining the accuracy of data in the CMDB and maintaing appropriate ownership and access levels
- and most importantly, in ensuring multiple IT management systems talk to each other and exchange data
It is in this context, the recent announcement by the CMDB federation (www.cmdbf.org) around the release of the draft industry CMDB standards for a CDMB is particularly welcome. Several product vendors such as IBM, BMC software, HP, CA and Fujitsu ltd have provided their support for the draft framework. (See http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=122436 press release for details)
Most organizations today, use a multitude of IT Service management tools to support their developing BSM frameworks. Given legacy reasons and the product development histories, customers tend to use components from the product families such as BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, IBM Maximo, IBM Tivoli etc on a "best-of-breed" basis. This leads to a spiraling of IT spends in terms of writing integration adapters such that data/events/alerts from one tool can be exchanged with another.
In case the CMDB federation draft standards are approved and adopted industry-wide in the days to come, this would mean a substantial impovement in organizations' ability to continue with a federated approach to a CMDB implementation. Several organizations have balked at moving forward with a federated approach (centralized approach being severely limited in scope) owing to apprehensiveness about costs escalation unknowns around integration.
Federated CMDB models and architecture such as a sample representation below would become the preferred architecture within organizations.
Another additional development that also comes in time is the development of the Distributed Management Task Force standards (DMTF) (http://www.dmtf.org/). These standards enable interoperability between multiple infrastructure devices and their management platforms. Several successive versions of the CIM (Common Information Model) schemas have been released and these standards are increasingly being adopted by most leading industry vendors.
While DMTF standards precede the development of the standards set by the CMDB federation, the verdict is still awaited around how these standards work together and in practice.
It also remains to be seen on how soon the IT hardware and IT management software industry set aside their proprietary frameworks and adopt such frameworks. The faster the adoption, the sooner we will see real BSM in practice
Comments
Another interesting development is the The Return of Open Source to the ESM space. While commercial Open source companies, like Zenoss, are in market with ESM tools, the Big 4 is opening up their garage, encouraging developers to contribute in building integration adapters (See BMC Developer Connect). Then again, the focus will be on scalability, support and above all - functionality and not on the “free” tag!
Posted by: Yesudas Jayson K | August 17, 2007 08:58 AM