Discoverable data centre infrastructure

David Cuthbertson of Square Mile Systems was kind enough to demonstrate his AssetGen software to myself and Denis last week.

Once the data has been inputted into a CMDB like AssetGen all sorts of very impressive reports can be generated very quickly.

Implementing a CMDB involves a heavy up front investment because you have to manually enter at least 50% of your infrastructure and associated dependencies.

The cause of the steep initial investment in CMDB is the invisibility of infrastructure in the data centre to auto-discovery software, meaning that infrastructure cannot be auto-discovered in the same way as devices on the network.

Denis was chatting to a chap working for a well known insurance company over the weekend and they have 8,000 devices on their network that they’ve given up trying to track down.

If your server cabinets knew what equipment they contain then maintaining a CMDB would require a far lower initial investment of time and money. In addition, intelligent infrastructure would make tracking changes to the infrastructure much easier.