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Automation scenarios

The following common scenarios might apply to your automation needs.

Scenario 1: Provisioning of storage resources

Angela is an expert administrator who usually spends much time processing storage provisioning requests from different departments in the company. Last month, her company purchased Hitachi Ops Center Automator to automate some of the manual tasks her team has been doing to process such requests. Currently, she uses homegrown management tools to configure storage resources for provisioning. After installing and configuring Ops Center Automator, she began reviewing the prepacked service templates provided with the application. Angela quickly discovered that the templates are preconfigured, greatly reducing the number of time-consuming tasks she previously had to do manually before starting the provisioning.

Angela just received a high priority request to provision storage for an Exchange 2010 server in 48 hours. Because she used a service template, she was able to reuse most of the configuration settings that she would otherwise have to do manually.

She created a new service named "Exchange 2010 provisioning" for the Legal department and added some volume-specific settings, for example, pool information, required virtual capacity, and host information, as parameters to the service and submitted the service. She scheduled it to run at 2:30 am the following day.

The next day, she found that the service was registered and submitted on time. The task generated from the service completed successfully and the required provisioning request was processed before 48 hours.

The following figure depicts the scenario.

Steps in provisioining storage resources
Scenario 2: Monitoring disk allocation service

Because of the high volume of service requests for storage allocation, John who is an expert administrator has been spending at least 60% of his time closing level 1 tickets, which primarily involve preparing resources for provisioning and then monitoring the status of all submitted requests.

He is beta-testing the Ops Center Automator software, which his company is considering for purchase to help expert administrators like John to delegate level 1 duties to service users in the company.

Earlier in the day, he received a storage provisioning request for an Oracle database used by the accounting department. For this request, he decides to use an Oracle service template that will help save him the manual effort. Using the service template, he creates a service and names it "Oracle ASM for accounting." He then edits the service settings to specify the mandatory parameters, such as number of volumes required and volume capacity and saves it.

For submitting this service request, John decides to use the task management and monitoring features of the product. He asks Bill, a novice administrator (service user) to submit the "Oracle ASM for accounting" service and schedule it to run immediately. He leaves for the day after giving clear instructions on how to submit the service and then monitor the task generated from it. Following John's instruction, Bill submits the service and uses the Tasks tab in the application to monitor the task. When the task ends with an error, he gives John the error details. John recommends that Bill resubmit the task and continue to monitor it.

The following figure depicts the scenario.

Steps in monitoring disk allocation service.