Ever wondered when your data center grows larger and larger, more switches, cabling, bigger storage arrays, thousands of servers.Managing the arrays become a challenging job. keeping records of what is connected to what,where becomes unimaginable. Keeping things in track is always a challenging job. From a storage admin perspective, keeping the logs, zone databases, connectivity diagrams and help us to a great extend. But when things are changing in much faster rate, Keeping journals update require a lot of manual interventions, the time required to handle a change or incident becomes larger. But we admins are used to it and somehow will run the show. But to stand out and to bring the spot light on to you, I guess we need more fire power. Things needs to be automated. But how ? What tools ? Is it really worth ?
When there is a will there is always way. Create a flowchart. Break down things to smaller chunks. Write scripts and automate ! This blogs mostly contains the work and ideas which I have used to break down my challenges as a storage admin. Most this blog covering the operations from automation and scripting perspective assuming the reader know the architecture and terminologies.
Lets start with creating a database for your Cisco fabric. Brocade guys please excuse me as, I would be posting one real soon.
StorageWind 