Storage Left Out of CMDB Loop: Page 3 of 4

Storage vendors are reticent on the subject, with a few exceptions: EMC's purchase of nLayers last summer led to the issuance of its own CMDB product, the Smarts Application Discovery Manager. (See EMC Nets nLayers, Scopes Security and EMC Unveils ADM.) And Symantec says CMDB is part of its Data Center Foundation software.

Analysts say these rumblings herald some upcoming activity. "Most CMDB strategies are so far evolving without consideration of the storage fabric," maintains Dennis Drogseth of the Enterprise Management Associates consultancy. "EMA believes that in the coming 1- 3 years, however, this will begin to change radically, as storage technologies and the data they support become a growing requirement for CMDB inclusion, as well as a recognized resource for more effective CMDB design.

It's a nice vision. So far, though, the big players like HP and IBM haven't been able to cooperate with each other, let alone with storage vendors such as EMC. A CMDB standards effort announced in April 2006 appears to have petered out, for instance. (See Standard Response and Tech Leaders Create Fed Spec.)

Part of the problem could be laid at the doorsteps of the storage vendors themselves, who are notoriously lacking in the ability to define common storage management interfaces that would make it easier for third parties to add support.

Still, there is hope. Consider the following remark from Chris Gahagan, EMC SVP of resource management software, made at the announcement of Smarts 5.0 in September: "Our acquisition of nLayers ... was driven by our strategy to provide infrastructure management across the application, network, server, and storage domains."