The CMDBf team did it. It’s done. The CMDB Federation Working Group (http://cmdbf.org/) has published CMDBf Federation Public Interim Draft Version 0.95 of a specification for federating CMDBs. The technical committee has been meeting two-to-three times a week for over a year now. I am sure that some weeks, members of the working group spoke more to each other than to colleagues at their respective companies. We called it 0.95 because this draft is from the 6 companies in the working group (BMC, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft). Our next step will be to propose the specification to an industry standards body and we wanted to save 1.0 for that effort.
The specification describes architecture and interactions for federating heterogeneous data repositories to act as a single data store for a CMDB (Configuration Management Database (CMDB) as described in ITIL® (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). The federation supports an aggregate view of resources even though the data and underlying repositories may be diverse and separate.
Underneath the abstraction is the goal of interoperability.
In the CMDBf, vendors have a public specification that defines interfaces that they can build into their products. Using those interfaces, vendors can build modules that do not rely on one-off proprietary integration.
One product can be built as a federating CMDB designed to draw data from many repositories. Other products can be built or modified to be data sources for a federating CMDB. Using the public specification, a data repository from one vendor can be plugged into a federating CMDB from another vendor.
The products that plug into the federating CMDB can be diverse. Using the CMDBf specification, incident and problem management, network management and asset management systems, and device monitors, can all have CMDBf interfaces that allow them to be plugged into a federating CMDB.
In the course of achieving this lofty goal, a body of best practices will surely develop to address many of the opportunities and difficulties that arise from federation, but with the publication of this specification, a stable foundation has been laid.
For those of us who have struggled to build and integrate enterprise IT management systems applications for years, this is thrilling stuff. At CA, integration and federation influences every development decision we make. We were proud to bring our expertise to the CMDBf table and help build our experience with enterprise management into the specification.
The results at CA have been great. I have been discussing the specification with developers all over CA. Already, code has been written and plans are in the works to write more. I don’t think I have been this excited about a spec since I caught my first SNMP trap in February 1990.
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