IT initiatives such as service management and data center transformation require cross-domain information sharing and collaboration around the perspective of services provided to the business. At the same time, the dynamic and distributed nature of IT environments creates more specialized management silos and fragmentation of the very business service information that must be shared.

The concept of a configuration management system (CMS) introduced as part of ITIL Version 3 helps address this problem. Mahesh Kumar, director of marketing in the HP Software Business Service Management team, explains the concept behind CMS, the benefits companies can obtain and HP’s response to CMS.

Question: First of all, what is a configuration management system?

Kumar: ITIL Version 3 defines CMS as a set of tools and databases that are used to manage an IT service’s configuration data. It includes information about incidents, problems, changes and releases. And it may also house data about employees, suppliers, customers and users.

A CMS creates a common view of a company’s business services by providing access to information across IT silos. This facilitates an IT organization’s transformation from a focus on technology to a focus on business outcomes driven by the services IT provides to the business.

Question: What are the main benefits of a CMS?

Kumar: First and foremost to provide timely and relevant information about a service in the proper context. For example, in a CMS environment, each IT management domain can access information managed by other domains that relate to a business service and its components – from detailed middleware configurations and server settings to software licenses to service SLAs and service users. Today this information is either inaccessible or ignored all together when making decisions. The CMS enables IT management and specialists to easily access more complete information about their business services and make better, faster business decisions. This in turn helps improve business service and application quality, decrease the amount of time to resolve incidents and reduce costs and risks throughout the service lifecycle.

Question: How is a CMS different from a configuration management database (CMDB)?

Kumar: ITIL Version 2 described the CMDB as a single source of truth about the IT environment. The CMDB focused primarily on providing a shared physical and logical description of business services. These were comprised of configuration items (CIs) – such as infrastructure components, component attributes, applications, processes, documentation – and their relationships to one another.

The ITIL definition of a CMS expands upon the concept of the CMDB. Whereas the CMDB is characterized as a single, physical data store, a CMS includes tools for information integration, knowledge processing and presentation across many systems, including one or more CMDBs, that are responsible for a portion of a company’s total service information. A CMS consists of not only the core configuration information in a CMDB, but also configuration details, management data and other processed information about a CI – such as incidents and problems – that is required to support the CI’s full lifecycle.

Question: Can companies use an existing CMDB to create a CMS?

Kumar: A CMDB can be a key component of the CMS structure. Typically a CMDB is a single, physical data store that focuses primarily on providing a shared physical description of a company’s business services. A CMS extends the functionality of traditional CMDBs through the creation of an integrated CMDB that not only stores core configuration items and models their service relationships, but also enables dynamic access of other data sources to provide all IT management domains with a more complete, common understanding of business services. Thus the integrated CMDB provides a single point of access to multiple federated data sources without becoming the single repository.

Question: How do companies create a CMS?

Kumar: Well first you have to understand that there is no single technology to build a CMS that applies to all uses in a company. But most IT organizations have already started down the road to service information sharing through a variety of data integration methods. Unfortunately traditional integration approaches each have their limitations.

For example, a data warehouse can play an important part in a CMS approach, particularly for historical reporting and analytical trending functions. But for most companies, data warehouses cannot serve as the only CMS integration mechanism. That’s because the delay in loading information from source systems to the data warehouse is too high for many uses.

Whether it’s a person or an application that needs service data, they need high confidence that certain information is current, complete and authoritative as of minutes ago. A more scalable and flexible means of enabling a CMS is through a federated approach for querying information across disparate systems without having to move or copy the data from there.

Through federation, a virtual CMS is created by linking data from multiple, distributed repositories through a common service context. This approach allows organizations to use existing tools and repositories to work with information in an integrated CMDB to form a large virtual database of information related to the services IT provides to the business.

Question: What is HP’s approach to CMS?

Kumar: HP understands that CMS is a virtual system that includes a company’s existing and future data sources, as well as the specialized knowledge processing and views form client applications. With that in mind, HP has introduced a CMS solution that pulls information from a variety of sources together into the context of a company’s business services.

At the heart of this solution is the HP Universal CMDB, which provides a single version of the truth about the relationships between infrastructure, applications and business services. It also offers “actionable federation” through a federation SDK, which allows data to be accessed on demand from a variety of sources, without being copied into a monolithic database.

The HP Universal CMDB integrates with HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software, which populates and continuously updates the HP Universal CMDB with infrastructure, application and service dependency information discovered from an environment, and dynamically maps it to your applications and services.

HP also offers a number of business technology optimization solutions that act as data sources for consumers to the HP Universal CMDB. In addition, several third-party products are also integrated with the CMS ecosystem both as a data source or provider of information to the CMS and also as a consumer of information via the HP Universal CMDB, thus enriching the CMS solution.