Integrated Automation

Automation is a primary goal that TriParadigm strives to achieve with all the applications, programs, and tools we develop. Furthermore, we understand that in today's data center environment, a standalone tool is virtually worthless. All tools must easily integrate with one another to provide the level of automation required by system administrators in large data centers. Advanced automation is required by system administrators in large data centers because of the diverse responsibilities they have, which include but are not limited to:

• Deployment of new systems
• Monitoring and performance
• Audit compliance and response
• Security compliance and assessment
• Maintenance and support
• User Management
• Change control
• Decommissioning of retired systems
• Procedural Documentation
• Documentation Management
• High Availability implementation and testing
• Disaster Recovery planning, testing, and implementation
• Business continuity architecture and design

This list of responsibilities requires the system administration staff to have many years of experience to be able to support such wide ranging and diverse capabilities. It typically requires numerous teams of system administrators to provide the technical expertise identified by this list.

The TriParadigm methodologies and tools automate many of these tasks and reduce the level of expertise required to manage a modern data center. And because the information generated by TriParadigm's tools is standardized according to our business continuity methodology, the information can be shared between the tools thus increasing the level of automation achieved.

EXAMPLE:
An example of this integrated automation concept can be illustrated by TriParadigm's disaster recovery management system, P3 DRMS. This tool uses information from the Configuration Management DataBase to determine system configurations and the procedures necessary to achieve a disaster recovery failover for a production system. After automatically analyzing this information, an automated disaster recovery procedure is generated, and human readable documentation is also generated. This documentation is automatically incorporated into the document management system and disaster recovery plans are updated. As system configurations change, this process recogizes these changes and all components interact to automatically reflect the changes.