Mark Johnson, a senior programmer at IBM, is a member of the CMDB Federation Working Group. this group, founded in april 2006, aims to create a specification for sharing information between CMDBS and other data repositories. the group will submit the specification to an industry standards body.
ITIL: Can You See The Big Picture?
Configuration management is at the heart of major trends in IT, including ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)--a set of best practices developed by the British government--and service management, which orients IT around supporting business services rather than traditional fiefdoms such as server groups, switch and router groups, and so on.
ITIL describes a CMDB as the single source of truth about configuration items. A CI (configuration item) is a physical or logical asset of the network architecture--a server, a router, a desktop or a software license. The CI contains information about the asset--server name, MAC address, OS version, physical location--and the asset's relationship to other CIs--what subnet it sits on, what other servers it talks to, what services it supports.
All Politics Is Local
CMDBS are evolving from an IT Infrastructure Library concept into a product category existing both within and independent of the ITIL framework. Vendors say about half of the inquiries they receive about CMDBs are driven by ITIL conformance, but the rest see the value of a CMDB--improving IT efficiency and streamlining operations--without necessarily being interested in ITIL.
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