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Nowadays infrastructures for information systems may be highly complex. A bunch of servers, along with network and other IT components, may be used to deliver more than one service to customers or to the organization. As a matter of fact, a single piece of hardware can affect more than one service and more than one activity and, predicting the impact of its failure on the global IT infrastructure can be a hard task. At the same moment, tracking all components actually in use, their hardware configuration, the software that is running on them and so on, could require suitable management tool that can help IT infrastructure manager.
A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a tool that act as a repository of all the information related to an information systems components. The term CMDB derives from the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), a collection of best practice for IT Service Management actually released as version 3. Mainly the CMDB has the role of track components relationships and configuration. A CMDB normally is integrated among other software available (like for example Asset Management Systems but also ERPs) by means of ETL processes that avoid duplication of efforts in data entry. A CMDB manages object called CIs (Configuration Items). Each Configuration Item is a single part of an Information System and has its own properties described by a set of configurable attributes that normally cover three dimensions: technical attributes, relationships attributes and ownership attributes. The implementation of a CMDB solution inside an organization could be an important step towards a better mature IT management and could constitute an important step in an IT infrastructure costs rationalization and reduction strategy. Anyhow, the implementation of such a software can also be extremily bourdensome since the level of detail chosen as the minimun desired heavily affect the total amount of information that has to be inserted into the database. Professional CMDB solutions are able to automatically discover new CIs insiede an Information System architecture allowing therefore to save time while populating the database. As for any category of software, even for CMDBs there exist Open Source project that offer this kind of solution. An Open Source CMDB implementation is CMDBuild (http://www.cmdbuild.org). CMDBuild is an Italian Open Source project that offers the final user a wide choiche of customization in CIs attributes , relationships and processes to be managed. CMDBuild offers a web based graphic interface and therefore can also be used in shared environments. To be installed it requires the RDBMS PostgreSQL and Java. To have a quick introduction of its features and its capabilities the website offers a lot of introductory material (the large part of it is in Italian) and also a web accessible demo that can be used only after having requested an account. Further information regarding Open Source and Closed Source CMDBs can be obtained on the http://www.cmdb.info website or from Google (the following table contains some suggested links).
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