Social networking and wiki principles are to be used by Novell Inc as a means of ensuring the data loaded into its configuration management database (CMDB) products are as fresh and as accurate as possible.
An enterprise CMDB is only effective if the data that it is primed with is bang up to date, and Novell reckons end users can be coaxed into ensuring data accuracy of the CMDB in the enterprise much in the same way as Wikipedia does on the web.
Novell said that its latest release of its CMDB line offers a way of building role-based communities among groups of users who can then be relied upon to view and update the CMDB data.
An ideal CMDB repository should, according to ITIL, provide accurate information on all infrastructure configurations and their documentation in a way that will support all the service management processes of incident, problem, capacity and change management.
In a statement released today Novell noted, “myCMDB users can quickly extract IT configuration and workload information, model changes to the IT infrastructure, and generate reports that show how proposed IT changes will affect the IT production environment, and the business services it supports.”
Analysts consider that as a repository of all asset and service data, the configuration management database should sit at the very base of all analysis and decision-making that IT shops should be making about IT capacity, resources and the cost and quality of service delivery.
The challenge of maintaining currency of enterprise CMDB data is made doubly difficult by the number and pace of change of infrastructure elements that need to be entered and regularly reviewed.
MyCMDB stems from technology the company acquired from Managed Objects. All the big systems management software suppliers have products designed to support CMDB initiatives, and as a niche vendor Managed Objects designed service management applications that fed data to a CMDB.
The upgraded Managed Objects system brings Google-like context-based search to the CMBD process so that users can retrieve data on Configuration Items sorted by name, class, attribute or relationship.
