From
The IT Skeptic
There is ...Microsoft's Active Directory data model. Speaking personally, I'd say that Microsoft have a proven track record of bastardising standards to their own purposes, which means Windows-centric (of course) and anti-competitive (also of course).... There are any number of vendor models: one for every service desk product for starters.
The pre-eminent
open model is
DMTF/CIM, but see also
OASIS/DCML.
CIM is used by a number of groups agreeing standards on several protocols, including XML (
WBEM) and directories (DMTF/DEN). DCML is XML based.
There is
talk of a consortium of vendors looking specifically at CMDB. But so far it is only talk (try to find something other than a press release), and they have chosen to operate outside of any industry standards group. They say this is so they can work quickly. It also, conveniently, means they don’t need to publish anything to show progress. So don't hold your breath. I've seen the work involved in this stuff from the inside of a vendor. Even if they can agree on a model, the minimum work required by each vendor is to create a translator to accept and send XML framed in the standard model, and map that to their own internal proprietary model. There's a million bucks right there. Optimally, they need to rewrite their product to change the database and code to the new model. This is a top-to-bottom code rewrite. It costs millions (hundreds of millions for a big vendor with many inter-dependent products) and it throws them back to effectively a 1.0 release with all the stability issues and support costs.
See more discussion of
CMDB here
Linear Mode
