CIM about to make dramatic entrance

The Common Information Model (CIM) is a technology that so far has been relegated to backstage - but vendors claim key developments in coming weeks will hurry CIM into the spotlight. One of the most important events is this week's formal release of Microsoft's Windows 2000, which will support CIM. Another is the first real interoperability tests among different vendors' CIM implementations, expected to be held next month.

Developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), CIM is a standard way of representing management data. It provides a format for representing information about network devices, systems, applications and other objects normally managed through management software tools.

The DMTF has also developed specifications to express CIM data using XML, and to transport the data using HTTP. The result is that the management data contained in a CIM file can be retrieved using Web technology. Together, these technologies are part of the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative.

Because the data is in a standard format, management tools can more easily exchange data, even if the tools are made by different vendors.

Window on Windows

Of course, CIM is only valuable if a lot of devices and applications use it. Microsoft's move to put CIM into the new version of its operating system is viewed by many as a crucial step, because wide deployment of Win 2000 will mean wide deployment of CIM.

"We're going across the platform and instrumenting everything to CIM," says Casey Kiernan, director of distributed management at Microsoft. The processor, the BIOS, the memory, the device drivers, Active Directory, the file system, the operating system event log - information from all of these elements is communicated to the Windows Management Interface, which in turn provides the information to the outside world through CIM.

Other management software vendors are already looking to take advantage of Windows' CIM support. "Windows 2000 is a flash of opportunity for us," says Bob Quillan, Manage.Com's vice president of marketing. The start-up plans to use CIM to manage Microsoft's Internet-related software, such as Site Server and SQL Server.

Microsoft plans to include CIM in the upcoming consumer release of Windows, the Millennium Edition, for customer support. When a user contacts a technician with a problem, the technician can get information about that user's computer and applications through CIM.

The real test

Another critical step for ensuring CIM's widespread acceptance is making sure different devices and applications can effectively communicate using CIM. Next month, the DMTF plans to hold interoperability tests among 15 to 20 vendors at Cisco's headquarters, says DMTF President Winston Bumpus.

The event will be closed to the public, allowing engineers from the various companies to work out the kinks in their implementations. Bumpus expects makers of computer systems, net equipment and management software to participate.

Many of the vendors have very different ideas about what CIM is, and they may have trouble getting their implementations to play together, says J.P. Corriveau, a senior vice president at Computer Associates. "The interoperability event will be a great learning experience for the vendors involved," he says.

Managed Objects - a company that makes software to tie together management systems - is waiting for the interoperability tests to wrap up before it releases a CIM object manager.

Some CIM implementations have already been demonstrated. Members of the Storage Networking Industry Association decided to use CIM as the management model for storage devices, and the group conducted a demonstration of the technology in October.

"It was the first Internet-based use of WBEM anywhere," says Mike Dutch, director of enterprise architecture and technology at Hitachi Data Systems, one of the seven companies that participated. In the demonstration, a Web browser was able to pull up CIM information from devices around the country via the Internet. The data collected was very basic, showing little more than inventory, but it proved that CIM could work at an enterprise level, Dutch says.

More to come

The initial work on CIM is done, but the DMTF is still working hard to flesh out definitions for representing specific technologies and equipment. So far, the group has completed specifications for systems and devices, logical and physical network models, applications and distributed application performance.

Expected soon are definitions for policies, support management, telephony, service-level agreements and users. Some of these will be included in Version 2.3 of the CIM Schema, due out this month, Bumpus says.

Despite the fact that the enhancements, interoperability tests and other events are coming up, there hasn't been much publicity about CIM over the last six months or so, points out Colin Mahoney, an analyst at The Yankee Group.

Part of the reason is that vendors seem more interested in CIM than customers do, Mahoney says. While vendors are pushing CIM, many customers have their hands full trying to establish e-businesses and integrate their management tools with the new e-business world. CIM is in danger of becoming simply a checklist item, he says. Without customers pushing for CIM, vendors may not fully exploit CIM's ability to integrate management software.

On the other hand, e-business is increasing the need for CIM, says Richard Ptak, a vice president at Hurwitz Group, a consulting firm in Framingham, Mass. Companies will need an integrated view of what's happening with their servers, applications and networks, and CIM is a way to unify information from all those elements, he says.

The main reason behind the lack of publicity may be that vendors simply have their heads down, building CIM into their products. It remains to be seen whether that hard work will pay off for users.