CMDB technology overview

Agenda

• CMDB and Discovery relationships

• Competitors

• CMDB and BSM

• Market consolidation

• Users feedbacks

CMDB and Discovery relationships

CompetitorsProduct Comments

BMC Remedy (based on Atrium CMDB). The most tight integration with its other products. Other vendors almost always integrates with this product

CA CA CMDB r11 The Cendura acquisition gives CA a respectable application-mapping capability with a strong focus on detailed configuration information, which may attract green-field accounts

Cendura

EMC EMC Smarts ADM

Application Discovery Manager. In addition to providing EMC with agentless, real-time application discovery, nLayers also included a CMDB to store and manage CIs

nLayers

IBM Tivoli CCMDB IBM has created process managers for the CCMDB to automate IT processes according to ITIL specs: Release Process Manager for software updates, Availability Process Manager for root-cause analysis and problem resolution, and Storage Process Manager for storage consolidation.

Customers can take the information captured by Collation software and model what will happen when a change is made.

Collation

Novell CMDB360 strong focus on working with third-party dataManaged Objects offers more than 60 adapters (sold separately) to gather and reconcile CI data. CMDB360 uses an XML-based schema that conforms to the DTMF's CIM standard.

Managed Objects

CompetitorsProduct Comments

Microsoft System Center

focus on the Windows OS and Microsoft applications

Oracle Enterprise Manager CMDB

It has a strong focus on applications and middleware (both Oracle and third-party software) and OS information, less so on network infrastructure elements or asset information, such as software licenses. Thus, Oracle Enterprise Manager CMDB will likely play a role as a trusted data store that feeds CI information to a CMDB with broader enterprise coverage.

Tideway Tideway Foundation

It features strong visualization of dependencies among network infrastructure, applications and business services, and provides a reporting engine to help IT professionals track configuration changes

Business service management – BSM

• What is my overall IT capacity looking like?

• How much does this service cost to deliver?

• Where are the critical elements of the business support infrastructure?

• Should I virtualise this part of the application infrastructure?

CMDB and BSM

• A key goal of a CMDB is to help an organization understand the relationships between the main components of the IT environment and track their configuration

• The CMDB is conceived as an important element within ITIL, but that doesn’t make the CMDB pivotal to a BSM strategy

• Combination of new technologies such as application dependency mapping and visualization is valuable for IT managers

Ideal CMDB

The ideal CMDB, according to ITIL, should: • provide accurate information on

configurations and their documentation• has ways to support all the other service

management processes of • incident• problem• and change management

Real CMDB

Analyst and software vendors are pushing the idea of a federated or virtual CMDB as one means of reducing the complexity of deployment, using software tools that automate topology discovery to accelerate the CMDB build process.

That requirement has forced a good amount of market consolidation.

Market consolidation

Michael Allen, Compuware director of service management observes, “There’s been a real land-grab by the other big systems vendors, who all want to get onto this area. IBM acquired Collation, EMC bought n-Layers, Symantec took over Relicore, and Mercury had Appilog which of course are now both owned by HP.”

IBM Tivoli• Collation software automatically captures information about

IT resources, such as servers, applications and databases, and displays it on a detailed map.

• This enables IT to better understand the impact of changes to an IT environment – such as how a security patch can trigger a ‘domino effect’ of unexpected problems that can bring down an online business. It also helps shrink the time it takes to discover and correct a problem.

• “Without a solid understanding of how different pieces of the IT puzzle fit together, a single change can slow down or halt an entire IT system,” said Al Zollar, general manager, IBM Tivoli Software. “Collation software allows companies to visualize different change scenarios so they can analyze the implications before problems occur.”

IBM Tivoli

IBM Tivoli DDM

BMC Remedy (based on Atrium)

The BMC Atrium 2.0 architecture introduced a second generation CMDB data model, a more robust reconciliation engine, an improved ability to accept data from a wider range of federated sources, an updated graphical interface and improved access to third-party tools and management information databases.

BMC Remedy (based on Atrium)

BMC Remedy (based on Atrium)

Compuware• Compuware does not ship a CMDB of its own but

is able to integrate CMDB data into its Vantage Service Manager service management suite. Compuware notes that most organizations have several monitoring tools already in place. It espouses Vantage Service Manager as a way of bringing these together, with its capacity to integrate infrastructure management applications such as IBM Tivoli, BMC and HP; service desk software such as Remedy and Peregrine; and asset and configuration management systems, including any home-grown or commercial CMDB.

Users feedbacks

“Business Service Management from BMC Software helps us keep our on-demand products and services available and running at peak performance. Faster transmission of data between dealers and lenders helps them close deals in less time.”Charles Giglia, SVP and CIO at DealerTrack, a provider of on-demand software and data solutions for the US automotive retail industry

Users feedbacks“When we started with discovery, we found some surprises. For example, we found that the number of Linux servers and Windows servers was not quite what we had expected. We had thought we had anywhere between 500-600 servers in each of our data centers. It turned out we had about 800 of them, in each. We were a third bigger than expected. This was a shock, especially when we considered the implications for licensing and everything else downstream.”

“Our primary reason for using discovery, however, was to discover the dependencies between tools, networks and applications. There were plenty of surprises here as well.”

“Discovery and a CMDB are themselves of little value unless you have means and tools to analyze the information that has been discovered and then stored.”

Anthony Esposito, senior architect for an IBM CMDDB customer

Questions?