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.
