Digging into the DCAB’s 6 functional areas: Resource Reconciliation

 The second up and coming area goes by many names these days.  Some call it next-generation asset management, many others call it CMDB.

I’m calling it resource reconciliation as I would like to see it extend beyond a discovery engine, IT asset database, dependency mapping and the necessary graphical topology and reports.  I also believe that these tools not only should communicate directly with the infrastructure outlined in the Data Center Automation Blueprint (DCAB) – but also synchronize and provide reconciliation capabilities with the 5 other DCAB functions.

What I’m saying is I want to make sure that all my other functional products always are 100% accurate to what my IT infrastructure contains.  There is no reason my performance & capacity products don’t know about a specific IT resource.  Nor, do I want multiple discovery engines combing my infrastructure setting off false alarms in my security products or requiring me to open additional communication avenues making the infrastructure less secure.

Here are a list of the vendors I know of, this space saw some major consolidation during  2006.

BMC
CA (Cendura acquisition)
EMC (nLayers acquisition)
HP (Opsware acquisition)
IBM (Collation acquisition)
Symantec (Relicore acquisition)
Tideway

Another area I’m researching and pondering inclusion in this category are service catalogs (e.g. NewScale)  Any thoughts or opinions on how they compare to the players/products  above?