My previous blog post referred to CA Catalyst and the Unified Service Model (USM). Catalyst is the integration and application platform that implements the USM. Catalyst is not just a tool for integrating CA products -- CA's products come integrated. Catalyst, USM and the tools enable extension, configuration, tailoring, etc. for specific customer IT environments. We will be demonstrating the integration at CA World 2010 in May, 2010 in Las Vegas.
Figure 1 -- Catalyst and Integration
Catalyst's primary and initial goal is integrating CA's products, and integrating CA products with third-party systems. Current approaches to integrating IT management systems rely on point-to-point connections using product specific formats and protocols. Catalyst applies enterprise application integration patterns to the problem of integrating IT management systems. Specifically, Catalyst is a logical integration hub between connected systems (Figure 1 -- Catalyst and Integration) implementing web services standards based integrations. The key benefits of this approach are:
- Moving from NxN protocols, formats and technologies for connecting N systems to a single, standards based protocol and format. This reduction vastly reduces complexity and fragility.
- Catalyst's support for industry standards like web services and WS-Management allow the use of 3rd party, commonly used tools for integrating and extending systems.
- The logical hub provides a single point for monitoring the progress and activity of IT management processes, for example all of the product interactions to reconfigure a server cluster based on a failure alert.
Catalyst is not just low-level integration at the web services, formats and protocol level. IT management systems have different representations of common core concepts like "application server" or "router." The systems have the same information and manage the same resource types and instances, but have arbitrarily different representations. For example, differences might be
- Names for resource types and properties, e.g. "Router" versus "Network Switch," "IPAddr" versus "Internet Address," etc.
- Different representations for common data, e.g. representing a DNS name in a string like http://www.ca.com/ as a string versus a name-value-pair set like (("node", "www"), ("org", "ca"), ("domain", ".com)).
Catalyst's implementation of a Unified Service Model defines a logically coherent, common representation of common resource types and management operations. USM also correlates and integrates the data instances into a single, logical management data repository and management system. In essence, Catalyst/USM is a logical system of record (SOR) for managing IT systems and resources.
Figure 2 -- Unified Service Model
Unified Service Model provides a simple overview of USM's approach to integration, reconciliation and correlation. Logically, Catalyst/USM is a federated database, conceptually a federated CMDB. The existing IT management systems retain their information and capabilities. Catalyst/USM implements rules and policies for
- Mapping from existing data representations to/from the coherent USM representation.
- Correlating information to determine when more than one IT management system has information about a single IT resource. Correlation is logically similar to performing relational database joins using indices. USM's approach is not as rigid as SQL and relies on an extensible set of simple rules. For example, there could be rules that determine if "Donald F. Ferguson" and "Ferguson, D.F." are the same.
- Reconciling information when IT management systems have different, conflicting values for shared information.
Catalyst/USM's support for reconciliation and correlation rules, including rule/policy extensibility and configuration, is similar to master data management. Unlike federating CMDBs, federated database in general or master data management in general, Catalyst/USM
- Uses event based integration to update information in the external IT management systems based on the rules and policies. IT administrators looking at different IT management systems see coherent information, and do not need to manually reconcile different data to perform their jobs.
- Supports management actions and operations, in essence becoming a single point of management (SPOM) to drive the external management systems.
Finally, CA delivers a definition and implementation of USM and prebuilt integration of CA and 3rd party products. Subsequent blog entries will explain Catalyst's relationship to CA's products, support for customers' existing SOA and web service environments, application of common sense and simple approaches instead of building an overwhelming technology, etc. The number one rule of the CA architecture team is "Use common sense."
I am also preparing a technical whitepaper that explains Catalyst, USM, and CA's product integration. The paper also explains how the technology forms a foundation for CA's technical strategy. I will make the paper available in a subsequent post.