Configuartion Management Database (CMDB)

Today, when standards such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library is catching attention of IT industry as a whole, many organizations are looking to implement ITIL, or looking out for one of the cool vendors to implement the same for them.

Going forward, CMDB would play critical role in implementation of standards such as ITIL. CMDB is all about managing configuration item (CI) data in a logical manner. It is about sharing CI data in a common data store and ease the complexity related to managing non-critical attribute data in application database. CI data could be easily shared owing to its centralized approach and without the interference of complex setup.

CMDB is a single, centralized source of record that would enable the IT organizations to discover, manage and verify the CI data against the best practices recommended by respective software vendors.

CMDB is not only the storage of CI data but also a well thought strategy of managing CI data across the enterprise.

What is a configuration item (CI)? CI could be a hardware, software, employees that has configurable attributes. A CI is an instance of a physical, logical and conceptual entity that is a part of the environment and has configurable attributes. A hardware’s configurable attributes could be serial number, vendor, IP address etc. A software’s configurable attributes could be port, IP address, vendor etc.

Defining a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

Change and configuration management deals with management of configurable data. The configurable data could be of following kinds:

1. Software configuration settings
2. Hardware configuration settings
3. Relationships
4. Documenetation
5. People information - Business attributes

The above configurable data is also called as Configurable Item (CI). The information about the above mentioned configurable item is stored in a persistent storage also called Configuration management database (CMDB).

CMDB is going to go a long way in managing complex IT environments, says IT analysts. CMDB could help in one of the following manners:

1. Change and configuration management
2. Inventory management
3. Availability and release management
4. Incident management
5. Infrastructure and application management

The above-mentioned use of CMDB conforms to ITIL best practices. It is seemingly becoming evident that every IT company in near future would seek one or the other configuration management tool.

There has to be a couple of winners in the change and configuration management landscape. Lets wait and watch the fun of competition!

Configuration management technology

Change and Configuration management technology has been on upswing since last couple of years. There are 5 to 6 start-up companies that are competing to become leader in this landscape. Some of them are following:

• Cendura : Cohesion
• Configuresoft : Enterprise Configuration Managar(ECM) and Security Update Manager (SUM)
• Cirba : Configuration Audit Tool (CAT)
• Collation : Confignia
• HP Open View : Openview Management software solution
• BMC Remedy

Configuration management is about managing following:

1. Managaing configuration settings of files and environments of enterprise applications, and various other software applications inclusing application servers, database, web servers, messaging systems etc.
2. Managing files and registries for Windows OS

Change management is about managing change across various applications over a period of time.