Getting Started With Automation Director; About Automation Director - HPE XP7 Automation Director User Manual

Getting started with Automation Director

About Automation Director

As a storage administrator, you spend a lot of time performing repetitive manual tasks. These tasks are
not only time-consuming, but they also can be error-prone. Considering the changing landscape of data
center operation, you must spend your time on mission-critical tasks that assure the smooth functioning of
the data center. To fulfill the demand of data center tasks, you need software that can automate the
common infrastructure requirements and processes. With Automation Director, you can easily automate
time-consuming manual tasks and streamline workflows, such as provisioning, that otherwise take hours
to complete.
Automation Director is a software solution that provides the necessary tools to automate and simplify the
end-to-end processes, such as storage provisioning, for storage and data center administrators. The
building blocks of the product are prepackaged automation templates known as service templates.
Automation Director integrates with existing Hewlett Packard Enterprise XP7 Command View Advanced
Edition applications to automate common infrastructure management tasks by utilizing your existing
infrastructure services.
Some of the supported features of Automation Director are:
• Preconfigured service templates that help you customize automation services.
• Role-based access to defined services.
• Common service management attributes that can be assigned and shared across all automation
services.
• A customizable service catalog that users can create to address specific data needs.
• A RESTful API.
Before getting started with Automation Director, understand the following key concepts:
Service templates
A service template is a deployment blueprint for the application-based storage capacity provisioning
process. It is designed to encapsulate configuration settings, instructions, and tasks needed to automate
requests such as provisioning. The default configuration settings and tasks that are used in designing
service templates are based on best practices and real-world data center scenarios including resource
allocation, optimization, and configuration. When you install Automation Director, service templates are
automatically installed and are preconfigured for use.
Services
A service is an instance of a service template that is configured to work with your needs. When you
create a new service, you are creating a copy of the selected template and reusing the configuration
settings, tasks, and processes defined in the template. A service template is used as the starting point for
creating a new service and a service is the starting point for automating storage provisioning requests.
You can create as many instances of a service template as required. You can classify services by usage
and type categories and display them in a hierarchical structure. Because Automation Director enables
you to tag a service with multiple categories, you can filter services according to purpose, such as for
displaying services by workload or business unit.
8 Getting started with Automation Director