As seen in Chapter 1 and in the earlier sections of this chapter, there are great demands on the functionality of an enterprise-wide infrastructure management solution. Not only should the centralized solution be capable of managing tens of thousands of physical entities spread across the landscape that forms the infrastructure, but it also must have the capability to model, monitor, administer, and configure higher-level logical entities that map to business functions. Apart from these, it must also be able to perform complex computations that assess the impact of the various targets on the business functions. Another often ignored demand on the management solution is to take into consideration the geographical spread of the infrastructure landscape. This spread means that data needs to be collected across geographies with differing time zones. Business service models that take into account targets spread across geographies must consider data normalization...