Definitive Hardware Store
Today, I was corrected by one of my new coworker because I had the impression that all hardware within a given environment would be in the Definitive Hardware Store (DHS), while in fact ITIL defines it as :
An area should be set aside for the secure storage of definitive hardware spares. These are spare components and assemblies that are maintained at the same level as the comparative systems within the live environment. Details of these components and their respective builds and contents should be comprehensively recorded in the CMDB. These can then be used in a controlled manner when needed for additional systems or in the recovery from major Incidents. Once their (temporary) use has ended, they should be returned to the DHS or replacements obtained.
This basically means that it's a set of standby systems used for failing over services in case of incidents. It seems that more practically, the systems in the DHS should be ready to be re-purposed on demand to solve any upcoming capacity or availability issue (instead of being pre-configured to match all possible systems in the environment).
Also, with new technologies like virtualization would this mean that virtual server images in standby could be stored in the DHS ? Is a virtual machine image closer to an hardware component or to a software package ? Any comment ?
Technorati Tags: ITIL
CA acquired Cendura in September
Last month, CA acquired Cendura to complement its CMDB offering. This comes after a string of consolidations
in the discovery space (see my previous post about Applications and Asset discovery landscape).
It will be interesting to watch how CA integrates Cendura's Cohesion with its own Sonar technology :
Sonar watches and analyzes traffic on the network, and understands more than 1,700 protocols and information sources. It builds accurate maps and keeps those maps updated as resource allocations change.
Also, Cohesion is coming with an impressive set of rules that could be applied to ensure the compliance of configurations
with best practices. Integrating these rules on top of a CMDB could provide an interesting way of performing
configuration management (configuration audit) or even problem management (root cause analysis).
CA is expecting to integrate Cendura's technology within 120 days. Lets see.
New job
After a long break of more than a month, it is time to contribute an entry to this blog.
This break coincide also with a change of employer. After 11 years with Sun, working
on projects like Solstice Bandwidth Allocator, Solaris Bandwidth Manager, and the
IPQOS feature of Solaris 10 (well, 9 8/03 more exactly), and more recently on N1, the
change is really welcomed.
I'm joining BMC Software to look after the architecture and technical strategy of
the Datacenter Management Solutions. This sounds really exiting as BMC has
already all the components required to manage the full lifecycle of datacenter
infrastructure, applications and services. Bringing together the
Remedy Service Management , BMC Atrium CMDB , and Marimba product
lines into consistent solutions has the potential to solve many of the challenges
I have described in this previous post.
As before, I'll try to be as much as possible impartial, and will speak only for
me, and not BMC, remember :
The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my employer,
not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary altogether.
Technorati Tags: career