Organizations that prize diversity won't find a champion in an open standard anytime soon. Only a limited subset of vendors is participating in the creation of a draft specification to federate information from disparate resources. The project is being driven by the CMDB Federation Working Group, launched in April 2006. When completed, the spec will be submitted to a standards body.
The working group is focusing on three main issues: First, to provide a way for data stores to register the resources they're managing. Second, to develop a system, called an identifier service, that will understand the different ways that the same resource is identified--for instance, to know that a server may be listed by MAC address in one repository, by name or location in another. Third, the group is examining interchange formats to query information from various data stores.
To avoid reinventing the wheel, the group will look to incorporate the work of existing standards where possible, says Mark Johnson, a senior programmer at IBM and member of the working group (find excerpts of our interview with Johnson below). For instance, CIM provides a schema to define IT elements as common objects.
"I'm sure CIM is going to be an influence in what's done," Johnson says. "If you think about the data-modeling aspects, what are all the attributes associated with resources, we don't have to try and tackle much of that."
Johnson says the group is looking at other specs, such as Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM), an OASIS standard that describes an integration layer to connect management systems using Web services. SML (Service Modeling Language), itself a draft specification for modeling complex IT services and systems, is also up for possible inclusion. Considering that BMC, HP, IBM and Microsoft are members of both the CMDB and SLM working groups, assimilation is likely.
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