Putting CMDBs On a Pedestal: In the Cloud
From research and my recent conversations with co-workers and analysts,
A Pedestal in the Clouds: Accelerating Your Virtualization Journey
it seems clear that there is an increasing awareness that the existing notion of a configuration management database (CMDB) — where it is the central repository for all information about the data center and the decisions are made for its management — is an unrealistic and problematic model.
In today’s data center, the rate of change alone is too daunting a task for any one database management solution to effectively handle.
However, the CMDB remains a key piece of the puzzle because it offers a single place where we can go to make critical decisions about how to optimize operations, address configuration issues, and triage problems and service outages.
We need the CMDB — especially as our data centers continue down the road of virtualization and make their way to the private cloud. But we need to make sure that it has not only up-to-date and accurate information, but has the “right” information and that it provides federated access to real-time information about the resources that underpin the critical business services. Without integration from the discovery to the CMDB - and without integration between the discovery sources - this simply is not possible.
So, rather than continuously building new connectors to link discovery to our CMDB and hope that it can reconcile all the configuration items (CIs), EMC offers a new approach…Perhaps it’s not new…It’s actually well aligned with the ITIL v3 concept of a configuration management system (CMS)where the CMDB is part (a critical part) of a more modular and federated approach to configuration visibility across the data center.
EMC Ionix Data Center Insight offers a single integration point for best-of-breed discovery across applications, servers, network devices, and storage — inclusive of virtual environments. On top of this, it deduplicates CI data so a customer can reconcile CIs. It provides - through a Web services interface - virtualization of cross-domain dependency maps and the applied “best practices” based CIs to EMC’s (and third-party) CMDBs.
The result is a practical approach to populating and managing a CMDB with the “right” information, such that customers can easily understand the resources that underpin the business services. And they can visualize the infrastructure dependencies so they can more effectively plan changes and avoid inadvertently disrupting business services. With this, customers have all the foundational components needed to build an effective configuration management system — while making the most of their existing environments.
In my opinion, this is a real game-changer and I look forward to the continued buzz (and philosophical debate) that the announcement has already generated.
Thoughts???
Jeff Abbott
Change and Configuration, Cloud, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Dependency Mapping
Recent Comments