Date Added: 10/3/2008
Posted by:
 birdie
 suporthitug.org

Author/Source:
 DMTF

Viewed: 153 times

Managing the Distributed Enterprise

During the evolution of the information technology (IT) industry many advances in IT that have provided businesses with better efficiency and new opportunities. Processes that once were costly both in human effort and time resources can now be completed with progressively less human intervention and at much faster speeds. Such improvements have created higher Return on Investment (ROI) from IT budgets and new business opportunities made possible by newly available capital and resources. However, along with the productivity gains, added revenues, reduced overhead and increased flexibility that these IT advances have brought, management complexities have been introduced.

Because many of the systems that support these new business models were introduced sporadically and adopted on an as-needed basis, many companies  now have a plethora of disparate networks, systems, applications, and management software. A complex web of ad hoc integration frequently emerges to support the flow of information among these applications. Continuous business changes add to the complexity of interrrelationships among networks, systems and applications. This situation is currently impeding the ability of many companies to evolve their current systems to accomodate new business requirements and organizational needs.

Recognizing this problem, many companies are demanding a strong, standards-based integration solution that enables them to leverage their existing IT assets and better position themselves for future growth. Furthermore, companies are reluctant to make expensive up-front investments in integration technologies and services that might take years to pay off.

Solution:

In an effort to address these issues, the Distributed Management Task force (DMTF) was founded as a standards-based organization with a charter to lead the development, adoption and unification of management standards and initiatives for desktop, enterprise and Internet environments. Working with key technology vendors and affiliated standards groups, the DMTF is enabling a more integrated and cost-effective approach to IT management through interoperable solutions.

One of the standards developed by DMTF is the Common Information Model (CIM), a model for describing management information. The DMTF provides both a specification and a schema. The CIM Infrastructure specification defines the CIM rules and semantics. The CIM schema provides the actual model definitions.

The CIM standard is the language and methodology for describing management data. The CIM Schema includes models for Systems, Applications, Networks, Databases and Devices among other management areas. The CIM Schema enables applications from different vendors  on different platforms to describe management data in a standard format so that it can be shared among a variety of management applications. In tandem with another DMTF standard - Web based Enterprise Management (WBEM), which uses a SOAP-based protocol, WS-Management and WS-CIM - DMTF provides XML schema and WSDL mappings for CIM.

Companies implementing solutions base on CIM and Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) are able to realize the following benefits:

1. Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by enabling interoperable management of systems and devices in less time and with less effort.

2. Improve time to market and gain a competitive advantage by using standard-based models.

3. Reduce development costs by using and re-using existing standards models.

4. Leverage new opportunities by extending existing standard models.

Goals and Benefits of CIM

All goals and uses derive from the ability to define a single model for management information and service semantics - and to position everything relative to that model. Low-level equipment details and high-level service composition are both supported - using different abstractions in the object hierachy. Via relationships and associations, the roles of the equipment, software and low-level services (in providing functionality and supporting business processes) can be described. The tie of multiple settings (configurations) or statistics (performance management) to an element is also enabled via associations and the use of a well-understood object hierarchy. The object hierarchy indicates "where to look" for certain data while the associations describe the relationships and applicability of the instances.

Of special significance is CIM's facilitation of data reuse, delivering consistency of information across products and releases of products. For example, a chassis is identified by the same class of objects regardless of a high-end router. The basic abstraction of a chassis holds true in both cases - similar to a person's ability to identify a "dog", despite variations across species.

In the computing and networking world, there are many general abstractions that can be defined across vendors, products and problem domains. Consider, for example, the concepts of service (such as diagnostics and databases), devices (such as power supplies or monitors), or administrative domains. These common and consistent data semantics can be provided idependent of the repository of the data or the protocol transport used to retrieve it.

Taking a customer's prespective, costs can be contained since a single set of management tools and applications can be written, operating against clearly defined data. And, these tools need not change for each product and release since they are based on a single model and consistent abstractions. (Of course, change to support new product or management features would be encouraged, but the extent of this change is minimized.)

Another goal and benefit of CIM is its flexibility and support for extensions. This means a vendor or user can build on CIM to cover particular management areas. New subclasses may be defined, and/or new instances of existing classes created, as required to describe a computing or networking environment. For example, a customer could define a new high-level Service unique to their environment, and then specify dependencies on specific sub-services provided by various vendors. The vendor's services would also be defined using the model and therefore inherit/use the same methods and properties. Default settings for the sub-services could also be used and manipulated.

Closing Remarks

Modeling a business' computing and networking environments can be a daunting task. This is the ultimate goal of the CIM Schema. With technology continually advancing, the work will never be complete. For this reason, the model is written assuming an incremental development approach, with both top-down and bottom-up design. CIM also provides general abstractions and the ability to compose/decompose higher-level services and functions, permitting management at a less granular level (the top-down approach). No longer are there "silos" of data that must be translated, interpreted and normalized. With CIM, data has meaning, is consistent across vendors and products, and is more than bits on the wire.