IBM, on May 16th, announced its foray in Change and configuration management database (CCMDB) landscape. They detailed their plans on three new Tivoli systems management products, and also the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB), which federates IT information across multiple databases -- allowing IT administrators to track a single application running on a dozen servers. The new IBM Tivoli Process Managers includes modules related to management of following:

• Change and Release


• Availability


• Information Lifecycle

Competition is tough as some of the big companies like Hewlett-Packard Co., Computer Associates International Inc. said that they also have federated databases for consolidating IT information, basically relating to change and configuration.

IBM also announced several business partners along with whom it would be working to come up with what they call as "Discovery Library". Those business partners are following:

Cendura Corp.
Collation Inc.
NLayers Inc.
Relicore Inc.
Peregrine Systems Inc.
HyPerformix Inc.

Only time would tell who would be winner in Change and configuration management landscape. For detailed information on IBM announcements, visit the following link: IBM Adds New Choice on Configuration DBs

Discovery of IT infrastructure (hardwares/softwares) forms the key part of any change and configuration management strategy. The question to which many big companies having datacenters are puzzled about is "What do I have?" as part of IT infrastructure. What kind of change detection policy I need to have? What kind configuration data I want to manage? What would be policy related to change detection and configuration management?

In such a complex environment, it is very difficult to correctly manage the change and configuration information about all the softwares and hardwares that the companies have. And, even if these companies somehow accomplish to manage information related to change detection and configuration throug h manual processes, it is very difficult to then manage the patches, the licenses on ongoing basis etc. The implication of making mistakes at this point might cost million of dollars to these companies. They could have saved a chunk from this million dollars by having a reliable strategy for detecting changes taking place in complex environment and managing configuration for softwares and hardwares.

Large companies end up buying licenses every year without knowing if they are going to use it. They spend lot of time to confirm that they have the latest patch installed on their systems.

There comes the need of having accurate knowledge of IT infrastructure from time-to-time without errors and failures. And, this need gives birth to the Discovery of IT infrastructure. Any tool related to detecting change across softwares and hardwares and managing configuration would be incomplete if it does not provide users to know about their IT infrastructure from time-to-time.

So, if you form the part of evaluation team for evaluating any tool related to managing change and configuration, do not forget to check if the tool provides the auto discovery feature. Some of the points to look out when you are evaluating auto-discovery feature are following:

• Agent-less discovery:Agent-less discovery allows one to quickly do a network scan and know about the hardware infrastructures mainly. It might not however provide in-depth configuration information.


• Agent-based discovery:  Agent-based discovery requires one to put agent on each of the machines to know the configuration in depth for software/hardwares.