EMC acquires nLayers
EMC just announced that it has acquired nLayers, a vendor of IT infrastructure a management tool used to discover applications, servers, and devices, and to map relationships between them.
It was named CMDB leader in a recent Forrester CMDB wave report, even though I don't think that they really qualify as a CMDB. nLayers insight has the following features :
- Discover and Map
- Change Tracking
- visualize and analyze
Which indicate that their configuration database is populated from the discovered configuration, and not from approved change requests. It is therefore impossible to know if what is observed is the correct configuration, or is the result of an out of band modification. The nLayers solution is complementary to a real CMDB, under change control, if it is interfaced with a correlation engine, and an audit process which drive either :
- reverting the observed state to comply with the CMDB state
- update the CMDB state after creation of a change request.
Also, it is likely that because the information is discovered, the information about the CI cannot be changed to include user defined fields, or define custom relationships between CIs (which could not map to any discovered relation).
For example, nLayers Insight could not meet the mandatory criteria required for certification by Pink Elephant for Configuration Management (and they are not in the certified toolset list)