CA's Management Database (MDB): The EITM Foundation

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CA's Management Database (MDB) The EITM
Foundation

• WO108SN

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Abstract

• An integrated Management Database (MDB) is an
  important foundation for achieving effective
  Enterprise IT Management, this session describes
  what CAs MDB is and the value it provides.

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CAs Vision
Enterprise IT Management (EITM) is CAs vision
for how to unify and simplify the management of
enterprise-wide IT  
Manage and Secure
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EITM Unify and Simplify It All
Business Service Optimization
Security Management
Storage Management
Enterprise Systems Management
IT Processes Best Practices
Manage and Secure
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EITM - Manage Secure It All
Business Service Optimization
Security Management
Storage Management
Enterprise Systems Management
IT Processes Best Practices
Manage and Secure
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Agenda

• All about the MDB
• Deployment topics
• Support for standards

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The Problem In General

• Too many databases
• Complex to manage
• Require lots of labor
• Capital under-utilized
• Vulnerable infrastructure

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The Problem Disparate Management Data

• Too many versions of the truth
• If you dont know what you have, how can it be
  managed

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Benefits of CAs Solutions

• CA solutions provide comprehensive, integrated,
  modular and real-time solutions to
• Manage risk
• Improve service
• Control costs
• Align IT investments with business needs

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Built on CAs Integration Platform

• The CA Integration Platform is the foundation
  made up of a set of shared services providing
  tight integration
• Consistent user experience
• Integrated data
• Integrated processes and workflows
• Common policy
• The CA Integration Platform also contains a rich
  set of management and security services that
  deliver consistent definition and behavior

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CAs EITM Integration Platform
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MDB A Management Service

• Full spectrum of management data
• Integration at the data level
• Flexible deployment options
• Management for high performance
• Support for open standards and best practices

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The Value of Data Integration
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Full Spectrum of Management Data

• Assets and inventory
• Business processes
• Events
• Organization/people
• Policy/rules
• Schedules/workflows
• Service
• Software configurations
• Internal management data
• Management metadata
• Product settings

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Increased Visibility

• Requires single source of IT management data
• Speeds decision making
• Enables automation

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Management Intelligence
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Eliminates Redundancy

• Reduces maintenance and administration
• Integrates at the source
• Results in fewer data errors

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Extensible Definitions

• Customers and third parties can extend schema
• Allows integration beyond CA products
• Enables sharing of data
• Removes redundancy and keeps data synchronized
• Eases administration

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MDB Data Access Options

• Data transformer
• Moves data between MDB and other systems
• Basis for hub and spoke deployment option
• Supports XML as data source or target
• Example UAPM import of SMS data
• Formal Object Interfaces
• Delivered with some products
• Enable integration at a higher level
• Ex NSM Worldview API, ServiceAware for Service
  Desk
• Custom data integration
• Programmatic access to read and write the MDB
  directly
• Native SQL, ODBC, JDBC available
• Reporting and Data Mining
• Data stored in a relational database management
  system

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Deployment Options
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A Single MDB

• Applications share a MDB
• More applications provide richer data
• Little integration required

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Multiple MDBs

• Uses more than one MDB
• Integration may be required
• Product specific
• Distributed query
• Replication

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External Product Integration

• Integrates data from external and 3rd party
  sources
• Provides data from the MDB for use in other
  applications/products

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Relational Databases Supported

• Ingres r3
• SQL Server 2000
• SQL Server 2005
• Oracle 10g Release 2

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Database Server Requirements

• Enterprise utilization and access
• Disaster recovery planning required
• Cluster support for high performance
• 64-bit enabled

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Security and Availability

• Single schema eases security
• RDBMS integrates with OS security
• Online or offline backup
• BrightStor ARCserve

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Standards
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MDB and ITIL

• CA products used to implement ITIL processes
  store data in the MDB

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MDB versus CMDB

• The MDB stores information about assets and
  configuration items such as incidents, problem,
  change orders, capacity, finance, current state
  and a great deal more
• Can be used to support CMDB requirements
• Does not provide federated CMDB capabilities
• In general, is not a CMDB

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The MDB and DMTF/CIM

• CA has belonged to DMTF since inception
• Network and system management portions of MDB
  schema were designed based on early releases of
  CIM
• MDB CIM are not the same thing
• MDB is a complete definition of the management
  information required by CA products.
• MDB is a relational database
• Common Information Model (CIM) provides a vendor
  independent abstraction layer defined as an
  object model
• CIM interfaces to the MDB are being considered
  for the future

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Summary

• The MDB Management Service helps to
• Manage risk
• Ensure security and data availability
• Help meet corporate compliance / governance
  requirements.
• Support open standards and best practices
• Improve service
• Manage availability and performance of the
  infrastructure
• Real time data, not warehoused
• Flexible deployment options
• Control costs
• Optimizing IT assets due to improved visibility
  to data
• Easy to deploy
• Less management required
• Align IT investments with business needs
• Make informed management decisions
• Determine real cost of IT
• Ensure effective utilization of staff and
  resources

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Questions Answers