HP introduced new IT management tools intended to help provide organizations better control of their IT services through meaningful insight between software and infrastructure relationships. The new software, HP Configuration Management System (CMS) 10, provides users greater automated discovery capabilities. CMS 10 also introduces new capabilities specifically for service lifecycle design and operations, notably within both business service management and IT service management.
HP CMS 10 includes HP Universal Discovery with Content Pack 11, HP Universal Configuration Management Data Base (UCMDB), HP UCMDB Configuration Manager, and HP UCMDB Browser.
CMS 10 is built on a long heritage of IT management tools HP has developed over the past two decades, Jimmy Augustine, product marketing manager for HP Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. CMS 10 employs HP Universal Configuration Management Database, which “includes an integration to HP Network Node Manager I, that enables our clients to leverage this product,” he says. “HP has a number of integrations to both third party and HP products that enables clients to leverage their existing investments. This notion of integrations fulfills the promise of a configuration management system in which trusted data repositories are federated or integrated to provide a single business service point of view. HP CMS 10 helps companies control increasingly complex IT environments and assure business service outcomes.”
CMS 10 employs agents for some types of functions, Augustine says. “There are parts of the HP Universal Discovery that are agent based and parts that are agentless,” he says. “HP allows clients the flexibility to choose what makes the most sense for their business and business problem they are attempting to address.”
End users can also employ CMS 10 in environments that also include System z mainframe platforms, says Augustine. “HP’s trusted marketplace referral partner, Eview, and HP have a productized integration that enables clients to discover System z mainframes, the associated software dependencies and then bring the System z mainframe information into the HP UCMDB.”
CMS 10 is designed to help end-users more quickly discover software and hardware inventory, as well as associated dependencies in a new, single unified discovery solution. The solution is also intended to automatically locate and catalog new technologies related to network hardware, open source middleware, storage, ERP, and infrastructure software providers.
There's cloud and virtualized environment support as well, Augustine points out. “Also key to HP Universal Discovery is a new passive discovery capability that is ideally suited to highly dynamic cloud environments, which allows clients to update their configuration management database in near real time when new virtual machines and software appear and disappear,” he says. “A challenge with managing virtualized and/or cloud environments is the nature and frequency at which virtual machines move and are ordered as a key tenant in cloud environments is self-service.”
More information about the HP Configuration Management System 10.0 is available at www.hp.com/go/CMS.