On paper, federation and reconciliation are easy to describe. In reality, they can be devilishly complex to accomplish, often involving custom integration, SDKs, published APIs from vendors or some form of Web service. CMDBs include reconciliation engines to integrate third-party data, but these still require significant up-front effort by IT to create a well-defined naming schema for assets and their attributes.
Vendors promise to remove some of this complexity if we buy into a single management suite. BMC claims tight integration among its Atrium CMDB and other products--a click of a button will call relevant information from, for instance, Remedy or the BMC Configuration Manager portfolio, and deliver it into the CMDB user interface.
Products from Altiris, CA and Opsware have similar capabilities. CA's CMDB CI (configuration item) viewer shows up as a tab in its Unicenter Service Desk application and federates with other CA products, such as Unicenter Network and Systems Management. Other vendors are working to integrate CMDBs as centerpieces of broader management suites.
On the reconciliation front, BMC follows the DMTF CIM (Common Information Model) standard in its products for easy integration. All CA management products use a standard repository, called the Management Database, which simplifies reconciliation within the CA product family. For third-party products, CA touts its Universal Federation Adapter, software that can import data over XML and translate it into CA's CMDB schema.
EMC offers prebuilt adapters to federate and reconcile information from third-party products, including those from BMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Tivoli and Managed Objects. Like CA, however, EMC says its professional services team should be on hand to help get the adapters up and running. HP uses a federation and reconciliation technology acquired from Peregrine, called ConnectIT, that maps fields from one data source to another.
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