Net/Systems Management /

Time to pay attention to CIM and XML

By John Morency
Network World on Network/Systems Management, 11/2/98

One of the consistent industry themes over the past few years has been user disappointment and frustration with the functionalism and integration of system and network management products. There are many causes for this disappointment and frustration, but one in particular has been the industry's inability to agree upon and implement a common management data repository model. If such a model had been defined, agreed to and implemented, the likely result would be more satisfied users who were spending more of their time effectively managing their networks and less time implementing ad-hoc solutions for cross tool integration.

Various initiatives have been attempted over the years to address this problem. In the early 1990s there was the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Management Environment (OSF/DME), and approximately three to four years ago there was the work begun by the Management Integration Consortium (MIC). All of them failed due to both technical and political reasons, not the least of which was the fact that these initiatives were generally incompatible with the product directions of the major vendors whose support was ultimately required in order to ensure success.

Given past industry experience, it's quite easy for most users to become fairly cynical regarding the likelihood of any vendor-independent management initiative resulting in more effective cross product integration. However, given the recent attention paid by Cisco Systems to the Web Based Enterprise Management Model (WBEM) and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the basis for integrating its management system with 40 other vendor partners, there is potential reason for hope.

XML has significant potential as a data description language that will allow a web browser and a server to exchange tagged data of various types. At the moment, the Common Information Model (CIM) portion of the WBEM work is being updated to support use of XML as a CIM data transport. This is also a model that Microsoft will likely support over time given its strong support of the CIM standards.

Given the current state of the systems and networking industries, a potential standard that defines a more unified management data model and has the strong backing of both Microsoft and Cisco is very likely to play a strong role in the future of enterprise systems and network management.

Consequently, both the WBEM/CIM and XML technologies merit further investigation by users who have more than a passing interest in understanding which technologies will play a major role in the system and network management products of the future.