Converged Infrastructure Controller Automates Component Configuration
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Solution Overview
Problem
The manual and time-consuming process of configuring and managing converged infrastructure components, which requires users to follow vendor-specific blueprints and interact with different interfaces, increases complexity and costs.
Innovation Solution
A CI Controller that converts human-readable blueprints into machine-readable package specification units (PUs), allowing automated inventory, assessment, and configuration of CI components through interactive user menus and component tasks, eliminating the need for manual access to blueprints.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If manual procedures are followed to configure CI components, then each component can be properly configured, but the process is time-consuming and burdensome
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs self-service by automatically executing configuration tasks on CI components based on the package specification unit. The controller autonomously provisions, inventories, assesses, and reconfigures components without requiring manual user intervention, thereby reducing configuration time while maintaining proper setup through automated adherence to the specified design parameters.
2Adaptability or versatility
If multiple vendor-defined interfaces are used to interact with different CI components, then each component can be controlled, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The controller is designed with multi-functionality to interact with multiple different vendor-defined interfaces through a single unified device. It can dynamically adapt to and execute tasks across storage, network, compute, and virtualization components using their respective interfaces, thereby maintaining adaptability to control diverse components while reducing the complexity burden on the user by consolidating multiple interface management capabilities into one system.
3Adaptability or versatility
If multiple external systems are used to perform operations on different CI components, then each component can be managed, but cost and complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges multiple external system functionalities into a single integrated controller. This unified controller consolidates the capabilities to provision, inventory, assess, and reconfigures various CI components that previously required separate external systems. By combining these functions, the system maintains comprehensive component management capability while reducing overall system complexity and eliminating the need for users to deploy and coordinate multiple separate external systems.
Data Source
AI summary
A technique to bootstrap a converged infrastructure design includes receiving a package specification unit (PU) representative of a design of a converged infrastructure (CI) including compute, storage, network, and virtualization components, the PU including component readable tasks that perform operations on the CI components. The PU further includes an inventory task model associated with tasks to read inventory information from the CI components, an assessment task model associated with tasks to assess the CI components, a configuration task model associated with tasks to configure the CI components, and a user input model to generate prompts to solicit and receive CI component information from a user, and provide the received information to the other PU models. The technique displays a PU model menu from which the PU models may be selected, and receives a selection of one of the PU models through the PU model menu. The technique executes one or more tasks associated with the selected PU model to perform corresponding operations on the CI components.