* What is ITIL?
With many enterprises now looking seriously at the benefits they can squeeze from new technology trends such as grid computing, information lifecycle management and on-demand (or utility) computing environments, it is increasingly obvious that managing change grows in importance. Why? Because at the heart of each of these trends is the constant deployment and redeployment of assets and processes to meet the changing needs of the users. This becomes particularly challenging because in order for such systems to run properly they must be able to look across – and manage across – not just storage, but also most of the networks and systems.
Managing, monitoring and analyzing such changes amid such complexity are quite clearly impossible without an automated infrastructure, but how can even the best set of automation tools keep track of which asset is allocated where, what is offline and what is online, and so forth? The answer lies in the concept of the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB), a centralized data repository that holds all information about the status and changes in status for all IT assets.
The reality is that such a single CMDB will still be a long time in coming, if indeed it ever arrives. However, a much more practical concept than a monolithic CMDB is the idea of a set of “federated” CMDBs, multiple databases that manage subsets of changes and then share information with other CMDBs within the system.
Unfortunately, there is at present no accepted set of standards that defines what the data within a CMDB or set of CMDBs should look like. As a result, while many companies have developed CMDBs to oversee the well-being of their own sets of products, there is no way at present to pass data back and forth between the databases and let them interoperate with one another as a single consistent system.
The fact that such systems will eventually have to work together in a federated fashion is clear; much less clear however is what standards they will use to pass this information back and forth. XML and CIM are two consistently recurring standards to which many of the vendors outside of storage have turned; SMI-S from the storage world should play very nicely with these.
At this point, the idea of a CMDB is increasingly appealing. But how can we achieve the needed linkages between the various data sets now in use? One possibility is ITIL.
ITIL, the abbreviation for the “IT Infrastructure Library,” is an acronym that almost never pops up in U.S. storage circles but which our colleagues in systems and networking are beginning to use. It is a set of standards originally promulgated by the U.K. government, but that has now gained significant acceptance at locations worldwide as the best guidelines to aid the implementation of a framework for IT service management. By many measurements, it has become the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. The ITIL standards appear in a series of publications (hence, the “Library”) that define best practices for managing IT services.
ITIL is at present silent on the topic of standards that can be used for CMDB interoperability. However, if IT managers worldwide continue to subscribe to its ideas this may well turn out to be the forum within which such standards are defined. At the very least, it makes sense for U.S. managers to become conversant with ITIL. One good place to look is https://www.itil.org.uk/index.htm
