See more here: What is the difference between an asset and a CI? and Is a person a CI?
Federated Configuration Management Database
A CMDB enables organizations to provide their IT objects, relations and attributes in an up-to-date and accurate state. Since organizations often maintain several CMDBs with different contents, there is a need to have an integrated perspective to all the data (now its no longer one single CMDB but a CMS (Configuration Management System), a new term introduced by ITIL V3). That’s where the federated approach comes into place. Federation can either be fulfilled by physically replicate data from one CMDB (master) to another (slave), or by just providing an integrated view to the data from several CMDBs in a visualization layer. A CMDBf concept has to consist of the following considerations:
Define the master source for every type of object. One source has to be the only master whereas other sources (slaves) can consume the objects from the master.
Ensure all participating sources are subject to the data manipulation conditions given by the CMDBf concept to be able to provide consistent data.
Define naming conventions which are binding across the different sources in order to be in a position to relate identical objects to each other.
Work out a unique key concept which allows you to uniquely identify objects across the different sources as well as over time.
The CMDB Federation (CMDBf) working group was founded in April 2006, and today consists of industry leaders BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu Limited, HP, IBM and Microsoft. More information can be found at http://www.cmdbf.org/
Well, it depends. If you imagine an IT Object, for example a server, there are different activities you do with this object:
If you group these aspects you recognize two main areas:
When you manage your IT Object more in the aspect of financial value, you usually apply Asset Management functionality on it so in this terminology you could refer to the IT Object as an Asset; strictly speaking it is an IT Asset as there are also Financial Assets in your company…
And when you use (or need to control) your IT Object in a more operational management (Service Management) relevant way you usually name and maintain it as a Configuration Item (CI).
Conclusion is, that an IT Asset and a CI can point to the exact same IT Object, they only enlight different aspects of it. In this case, the Asset usually comes to life before the CI and lifes longer than the CI. This because
Of course it is possible that you manage IT Objects as assets only because you have no (or not yet) urge to also control them for service management) or you handle IT Objects as CIs only (because your are not interested to manage the financial / value aspect…) .
So, the answer to the question: “What is the difference between IT-Asset and a CI” is: “That depends on what do you want to do with the IT Object”.