Nice article this month from Line56.com - about the business value of a CMDB.

It’s by the ex CTO of Marimba - who is now CTO of the Change and Configuration Management space at BMC - Kia Behnia.

I’d expect BMC to push a CMDB message - they after all message ITIL heavily and have a CMDB product.

The nice piece about this article is the real difference ‘process’ and ‘best practices’ can bring - regardless of your management technology.

The other truth is that a single repository as a CMDB is unworkable - a ‘meta-CMDB’ or ‘virtual-CMDB’ is far more realistic. Kia refers to federated CMDB:

However, not all management data related to configuration items are appropriate for storage in the CMDB. This is why organizations should consider a CMDB based on a federated data model. Why? Just like links within the general ledger to financial details stored in the accounts receivable system, a federated CMDB links to IT details. For example, a federated approach allows for other useful management information — such as service level agreements, purchase orders, incident and problem tickets, performance and utilization data–to be linked to the configuration items within the CMDB.

It may not be fashionable to talk about tradtional NetWare anymore - but there is a vast installed base that is running this reliable NOS.

Novell Cool Solutions has been running a competition to showcase server that have been up for years.

Here is the latest round.

My favourite is this NetWare 3 server - it’s been running for nine years: