CMDB Federation announces industry-wide specification for sharing data
ConvergenceAsia staff
22/08/2007

The CMDB Federation (CMDBf) working group has announced it has drafted an industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other management data repositories (MDRs), such as asset management systems and service desks.

The specification, which the group plans to submit as a standard, is intended to enable organisations to federate and access information from complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures. Founded in April 2006, the CMDBf consists of industry leaders BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu Limited, HP, IBM and Microsoft.

An industry standard for federating and accessing IT information will integrate communication between IT management tools. With a standard way for vendors and tools to share and access configuration data, organisations can use their CMDBs to create a more complete and accurate view of IT information spread out across multiple data sources.

The draft specification defines query and registration web services for interaction between a federating CMDB and an MDR, based on HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, and Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) standards.

A federating CMDB can access data from a participating MDR using the query service defined in the specification and implemented by the MDR. A client of a federating CMDB can also use the query service to extract data from another federating CMDB, making it possible for a CMDB to hierarchically federate with othso er federating CMDBs. An MDR can also export data to a CMDB that has implemented a registration service.

Earlier this year, the group published a white paper to describe how data from multiple sources will be federated into a CMDB. The specification and white paper are available at http://cmdbf.org/.

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