Novell Ships First Social Networking-Based Application for Configuration Management Databases

Novell today announced the general availability of myCMDB™, the only Web-based application that taps into the power of social networking to significantly enhance enterprise configuration management database (CMDB) usability, accessibility and accuracy. Obtained through Novell's recent acquisition of Managed Objects, myCMDB is the industry's first product to utilize a community-based architecture, similar to social networking applications, to provide a single view of federated data center resources across any physical or virtual environment. myCMDB is the latest addition to Novell's portfolio of solutions that enables customers to build an agile and interoperable next-generation data center using their existing IT investments.

In today's complex and rapidly changing data center environment, up to 60 percent of all planned IT infrastructure changes fail because organizations do not completely understand the impact of a proposed change before implementation. A CMDB helps by serving as a repository of information for all the components that are part of a data center or an IT infrastructure, as well as the relationships across each. However, CMDBs and their associated federated data sources require regular and frequent maintenance to ensure configuration item (CI) attribute and relationship data is accurate and up to date.

According to Forrester Research1, A CMDB is only effective if it is up-to-date, as many processes such as change and release management, capacity management, and improvement of service management, rely on the 100% accuracy of the CMDB. To ensure that the CMDB is accurate and up-to-date, you must develop a process for updating the CI attributes, adding, changing, and deletion of attributes, and CIs. This is a key process once the CMDB is in production and becomes the center for good configuration management, which then can be leveraged by all other ITIL processes. 1

Using the principles of social networking myCMDB delivers role-based "communities" where users can more easily and effectively update, view and interact with CMDB data and users. myCMDB users can quickly extract IT configuration and workload information in near real-time, model changes to the IT infrastructure, and generate reports that graphically show how proposed IT changes will affect not only the IT production environment, but also the business services it supports as well.

By delivering critical capabilities that make CMDB visualization, navigation, search, analysis and reporting measurably easier and more intuitive, myCMDB serves to make the CMDB a more valuable, user-friendly tool. This drives greater usage and contributions, enabling the CMDB to become a more accurate representation of the actual IT infrastructure - much in the same way end users drive data accuracy in repositories such as Wikipedia.

"myCMDB positions internal IT organizations and service providers alike with the capability to tackle today's complex configuration management demands - one perfect example is the cloud computing infrastructure," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager of Systems and Resource Management at Novell. "With myCMDB, organizations have the power to effectively manage cloud-based configurations and answer critical infrastructure questions such as 'where and on what is my workload running?' This effectively lowers the risks inherent in changing these complex environments while at the same time offering greater transparency."

myCMDB seamlessly integrates with all commercially-available CMDBs, including Novell's CMDB360. Key features of myCMDB include:

• A community-based architecture to provide meaningful role-based views of CMDB data
• Role-based user profiles to personalize the community experience with tailored homepages, a community update feed and reports
• Intelligent and intuitive Google-like context-based search to easily retrieve data on CI name, class, attribute, relationships and flags
• A built-in graphical relationship viewer that enables an intuitive, dynamic and easy-to-use graphical model of an organization's IT infrastructure
• A personal modeling environment to dynamically model and analyze CMDB data outside of a production CMDB environment and allow users to create, update and delete CI and CI relationship information