Network executives who want to resolve problems more quickly, manage the life cycle of software and hardware assets, and adopt IT governance best practices have probably talked about implementing a configuration management database.

CMDB has become the buzzword du jour for management software makers and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) advocates. CMDBs promise financial gains through better asset management and reduced manual labor because of automated processes. It promises to increase operational efficiencies derived from management data correlation across multiple systems.

Yet what is involved in deploying an effective CMDB eludes many potential customers, experts say. "There is a lot of confusion over what a CMDB actually is, but it is such a compelling proposition that IT managers must wade through that confusion to find their way toward the management data integration and best practices it will provide," says Dennis Drogseth, a vice president with Enterprise Management Associates.

Born from ITIL best practices, a CMDB includes a large amount of information - including applications, operating systems, patches, hardware model, life-cycle costs and user connections - about all IT configuration items within a corporate network. CMDB supporters say the technology helps IT managers aggregate data from multiple sources into a single system and make sense of different data formats, and reduces the time it takes to solve problems. For instance, if a server is downed by a configuration change, the CMDB could identify the change quickly and help IT managers restore the system before there was an impact on service levels.