The IT Skeptic is writing to us from his mountain retreat (via a time-delayed post on his blog), and the topic he felt safe to cover in such fashion (what journalists call an “evergreen”) is the fact that CMDBf is an orchestrated sham, brilliantly executed by IT management vendors.
I’d love to be part of something that’s brilliantly executed for once, even if it is a sham, but I am afraid this is not it. But first I should state the obvious, clarifying that even though I am a member of the CMDBf group at DMTF (and also an author of the original version, under my previous employer) I do not speak for the group or DMTF (or my employer for that matter). Just as myself, as always on this blog.
The problem that Rob England, Mr. Skeptic, has with the CMDBf specification is that it doesn’t do a bunch of things that he’d like it to do, such as specifying how data sources acquire data for their domain, how they store the data, how the underlying resources are reconfigured, what processes are followed etc. See the full list from his post. The list is a copy/paste from the CMDBf specification, with some comments added, so at the very least he has to admit that as far as “smokescreens” go this one is pretty upfront about its limitations…
He concludes that “this is once again a geeky technical solution to a cultural, organizational and procedural problem.” I have to ask: who expects DMTF specifications to solve “cultural, organizational and procedural” problems? Does CIM solve such problems? Does WBEM?
Human-to-human communication is a “cultural, organizational and procedural” problem and SMTP/POP/IMAP/etc (the interoperable protocols used by email systems) are just as geeky as CMDBf. They don’t solve the larger problem, only contribute to the solution. If CMDBf can contribute as much to datacenter management as SMTP/POP/IMAP contribute to human communication (minus the SPAM if possible), I’d call that a success.
And then there is this warning:
“WARNING: vendors will waive this white paper around to overcome buyer resistance to a mixed-vendor solution. For example if you already have availability monitoring from one of them, one of the other vendors will try to sell you their service desk and use this paper as a promise that the two will play nicely.”
Has anyone actually seen this happen? I am asking because so far, both at HP and Oracle, the only sales reps I have ever met who know of CMDBf heard about it from their customers. When asked about it, the sales person (or solutions engineer) sends a email to some internal mailing list asking “customer asking about something called cmdbf, do we do that?” and that’s how I get in touch with them. Not the other way around.
Also, if the objective really was to trick customers into “mixed-vendor solutions” then I also don’t really understand why vendors would go through the effort of collaborating on such a scheme since it’s a zero-sum game between them at the end.
As far as the glacial pace of progress (“Glacial advance. That’s the way the vendors want it” from an earlier post by the Skeptic), CMDBf is no race horse but I don’t see it going any slower than other standards. Slowness (I mean, deliberation) is part of the landscape. I would submit a slight twist on Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by legal, procedural and organizational inertia.”
Having said all this, some of Rob’s criticism is perfectly justified, such as his sarcasm about this sentence from the specification:
“The Federated CMDB operates in a closed environment, in which some security issues are less critical than in open access or public systems.”
OK, that’s stupid indeed. Especially in a public cloud environment where you don’t know who is renting the VM next door. I’ll ask the group to remove this. Actually, that whole appendix is useless and I pointed this out in my earlier review of CMDBf 1.0 (look for the “security boilerplate” section at the bottom of the review).
Rob could also have pointed out that this specification only addresses “federation” if you accept a very scaled-down definition of the term. What it does do is help with CMDB query and synchronization. Not the holy grail, but nothing to sneer at either.
Rob, next time you want to throw tomatoes at CMDBf while you’re on holiday, just give me the password to the site and I’ll do it for you… :-)
[UPDATED 2009/1/21: Rob responds via a comment on his original blog entry.]
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