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DMTF Tutorial
> Technology Overview
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Technology Overview
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Managing the Distributed Enterprise
During the evolution of the information technology (IT) industry many advances in IT that have provided businesses with better efficiency and new opportunities. Processes that once were costly both in human effort and time resources can now be completed with progressively less human intervention and at much faster speeds. Such improvements have created higher Return on Investment (ROI) from IT budgets and new business opportunities made possible by newly available capital and resources. However, along with the productivity gains, added revenues, reduced overhead and increased flexibility that these IT advances have brought, management complexities have been introduced.
Because many of the systems that support these
new business models were introduced sporadically and adopted on an
as-needed basis, many companies are now have a plethora of
disparate networks, systems, applications, and management
software. A complex web of ad hoc integration frequently emerges
to support the flow of information among these applications.
Continuous business changes add to the complexity of
interrelationships among networks, systems and applications. This
situation is currently impeding the ability of many companies to
evolve their current systems to accommodate new business
requirements and organizational needs.
Recognizing this problem,
many companies are demanding a strong, standards-based integration
solution that enables them to leverage their existing IT assets
and better position themselves for future growth. Furthermore,
companies are reluctant to make expensive up-front investements in
integration technologies and services that might take years to pay
off.
In an effort to address these issues, the Distributed
Management Task Force (DMTF) was founded as a standards-based
organization with a charter to lead the development, adoption and
unification of management standards and initiatives for desktop,
enterprise and Internet environments. Working with key technology
vendors and affiliated standards groups, the DMTF is enabling a
more integrated and cost-effective approach to IT management
through interoperable solutions.
One standard developed by the DMTF is the
Common Information Model (CIM), a model for describing
management information. The DMTF provides both a specification and
a schema. the CIM Infrastructure specification defines the CIM
rules and semantics. The CIM Schema provides the actual model defintions.
The CIM Specification is the language and
methodology for describing management data. The CIM Schema
includes models for Systems, Applications, Networks, Databases and
Devices among other management areas. The CIM Schema enables
applications from different vendors on different platforms to
describe management data in a standard format so that it can be
shared among a variety of management applications. The xmlCIM
Encoding Specification defines XML elements written in
Document Type Definition (DTD) which can be used to represent CIM
classes and instances. The CIM Operations over HTTP
Specification defines a mapping of CIM operations onto HTTP
that allows implementations of CIM to interoperate in an open,
standardized manner.
Companies implementing solutions base on CIM and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) are able to realize the following benefits:
1. Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by enabling interoperable
management of systems and devices in less time and with less
effort.
Some advantages of CIM and WBEM ar as follows:
Independence from platform, programming language and
compiler.
The WBEM transport protocol is independent of
platform, programming language and compiler. Developers do not need
to create and support development tools for specific platforms or programming languages.
Independence from information model. The WBEM transport
protocol is independent of the data that it communicates. Introducing
new devices or features does not affect communications between
management applications and the devices that they manage.
Extensibility. To add new management capabilities, an
instrumentation developer can simply extend their existing
management model to include new management information.
Easy integration of new management capabilities.
Management applications can easily leverage evolving management
capabilities without needing to consume additional management
interfaces.
Security and Internet accessibility. The WBEM transport
protocol is secure and Internet-capable. Instrumentation
developers can safely expose prototype management interfaces to
management application developers over the Internet to accelerate
development and debugging. Field test and development support
hardware become unnecessary.
Development tools and resources. Several
commercial and open-source tools facilitate development of
CIM and WBEM management interfaces.
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