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Pau Lo

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CMDB relationships for hardware assets

I am looking at the structure of a CMDB. I am told it is best practice to establish relationships between CI (configuration items), which I presume is to assist risk assessments, e.g. if you apply an update to a server, and that server has a relationship to a business critical application, obviously having that degree of knowledge about the infrastructure helps in risk assessment/timing.

But I was not sure what sort of relationships you would define with hardware CI's, or at least server level. The link of business software to hardware makes sense, but why would you define a relationship between 2 hardware items, and can you provide some examples and the benefits in doing so?
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Predrag Jovic
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Regarding relation between two pieces of hardware - server can be attached to switch and if I don't know that fact I can stop customer operations. During replacement of switch all services on server will be affected (if there is no redundancy implemented), and if customer is not aware that server will not be operational it can be extremely expensive. (let's say 1000 people is not able to work and still will be payed for doing nothing). :)
Who is responsible for that loss (customer provided relationship about servers but someone somewhere in the chain decided to ignore it, or customer did not provided information)?