As a storage administrator, you spend a lot of time performing repetitive manual tasks. These tasks are not only time-consuming, but they also can be error-prone. Considering the changing landscape of data center function, you must spend your time on mission-critical tasks that assure the smooth functioning of the data center. To fulfill the demand of data center tasks, you need software that can automate the common infrastructure needs and processes. With Ops Center Automator, you can easily automate time-consuming manual tasks and streamline workflows, such as provisioning, that otherwise take hours to complete.
Ops Center Automator is a software solution that has the necessary tools to automate and simplify the end-to-end processes, such as storage provisioning, for storage and data center administrators. The building blocks of the product are prepackaged automation templates known as service templates.
Ops Center Automator integrates with existing other management software applications to automate common infrastructure management tasks by utilizing your existing infrastructure services.
Some of the supported features of Ops Center Automator are:
- Preconfigured service templates that help you customize automation services.
- Automation services for provisioning of volumes.
- Role-based access to defined services.
- Performance-based pool selection that chooses the best performance pools from infrastructure groups and gives pool information to each task for specifying the Volume Usage details.
- Common service management attributes that can be assigned and shared across all automation services.
- A customizable service catalog that users can create to address specific data needs.
- A RESTful API.
Before getting started with Ops Center Automator, understand the following key concepts:
Service templates
A service template is a deployment blueprint for the application-based storage capacity provisioning process. It is designed to encapsulate configuration settings, instructions, and tasks needed to automate requests such as provisioning. The default configuration settings and tasks that are used in designing service templates are based on best practices and real-world data center scenarios including resource allocation, optimization, and configuration. When you install Ops Center Automator, service templates are automatically installed and are preconfigured for use.
Services
A service is an instance of a service template that is configured to work with your needs. When you create a new service, you are creating a copy of the selected template and reusing the configuration settings, tasks, and processes defined in the template. A service template is used as the starting point for creating a new service and a service is the starting point for automating storage provisioning requests. You can create as many instances of a service template as required. You can classify services by usage and type categories and display them in a hierarchical structure. Because Ops Center Automator enables you to tag a service with multiple categories, you can filter services according to purpose, such as for displaying services by workload or business unit.
Tasks
A task is an instance of a service. When you submit a service, Ops Center Automator creates a corresponding task that can be scheduled to run immediately or based on a schedule. A task can also be suspended, resumed, stopped, and archived based on your needs.
The following figure shows the relationship between templates, services, and tasks.
Infrastructure groups
An infrastructure group organizes storage resources and enables you to associate them with services and grant access to users. Resource groups that contain pools for storage are assigned to infrastructure groups. The infrastructure groups are associated with service groups. The services in a service group can access the resources in the associated infrastructure group.
Service groups
A service group is a collection of services. A service group is associated with a user group and a role is assigned to give the users permission to use the services in the service group. In addition, the service group is associated with an infrastructure group, to enable the services in the service group to use resources in the Infrastructure groups.
User groups
A user group is a set of users with a defined level of access. User groups are associated with service groups to enable users to access the services in the service group.