BMC Debuts Configuration-Management DatabaseBMC Debuts Configuration-Management Database

BMC Software on Monday will announce the availability of its Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB), intended to help customers unify their service and infrastructure management.

Based on industry-standard IT Infrastructure Library requirements for enterprisewide database management with consistency and simplified integration among different management processes, the CMDB is also the first offering by BMC to be branded under the Atrium name, says Andrej Vlahcevic, senior product marketing manager for change and configuration management at BMC.

Over the course of the year, BMC plans to introduce other management products under the Atrium brand. "A lot of people see a CMDB as a common set of information that captures data on the configuration and relationship of items in your IT environment," Vlahcevic says. "We believe it has to be more." The Atrium database was designed to integrate both service and infrastructure-management applications, he says, as well as complement the company's existing line of discovery tools.

The Atrium CMDB includes a reconciliation engine that lets users combine input from multiple data sources and identify and reconcile any differences to establish a configuration profile. "If you don't have strong reconciliation, the CMDB will end up with repetitive data that ultimately will create confusion," Vlahcevic says.

The Atrium CMDB was designed with industry standards in mind, he says, including those endorsed by the Distributed Management Task Force and the Common Information Model. The platform supports all primary IT Infrastructure Library configuration item classes and more than 80 potential relationship types that can be leveraged to characterize an IT environment.

The Atrium CMDB is integrated with eight existing BMC applications, including the IT Discovery Suite, Service Impact Manager version 5.0, and Remedy IT Service Management Suite version 6.0. It's available now and can be purchased as part of any BMC Remedy IT Service Management version 6.0 products and the Service Impact Manager version 5.0.