People involved in the project
Sponsoring Organisation
Optimation
L4, Optimation House
43 College Hill Rd
P.O. Box 106104
Auckland
Phone: (09) 309 7918
Fax: (09) 309 7919
Project Sponsors
Phil Pietersen
Alister Wright
Technical Advisors
Angel Petrovski
Ofer Reshef
Project Supervisor
Gerard Dunne
Email: Gerard.dunne@meme.co.nz
Project Team
Ihtesham Ahmad
Phone: 021 158 4758
E-mail: iahm005@hotmail.com
Mohamed Goolam
E-mail: mzgoolam@yahoo.com
Thilak Nathen
E-mail: thilak@yahoo.com
Optimation was founded in New Zealand in 1992 and it is part of the Mentum Group, an Australasian operation which is privately owned and also trades in Australia as Mentum Group. The two organisations work in concert to successfully deliver projects to some of the Australasia’s largest corporations and as well as to the many smaller companies who appreciate the value Optimation brings to their business. Some of the many clients to whom Optimation has provided services for, include Vodafone, AAMI, Air New Zealand, Inland Revenue, New Zealand Post, Royal and SunAlliance, Telstra, Tower Group, WestpacTrust and many others.
Optimation is a service driven organisation that has, over the years developed expertise in the areas of Security, Infrastructure and Integration, and Software Engineering, underpinning their technical and business skills with comprehensive project management and delivery disciplines and industry-leading technologies. Together with the Mentum Group, Optimation has over 100 staff members employed in Auckland, Wellington and Melbourne. Because the company is service driven, 70 percent of the staff members are in delivery and technical roles.
To find out more about Optimation Click here
This project aims to automate the manual process of capturing infrastructure information and information flows in a system to produce component specific configurations for the infrastructure components.
For example: a diagram of an IT network designed with drawing tools is used to produce a text file which is used to configure firewall rules.
The process currently adopted by Optimation is a semi-manual one; this is a five step process.
Each of the five steps is currently mostly manual. A few problems associated with the current process are described below.
· Labour intensive and complex
This is an extremely lengthly process. The generic rules are manually entered into Excel spreadsheets, these result in extremely large spreadsheets with thousands of lines of rules. The rules and layout of the spreadsheet is very complex and hard to understand. The process of writing up the rules can sometimes take weeks.
· Error prone and hard to manage output
Once the generic rules are written up, they are manually converted into device specific rules. This step involves the manual transformation of generic rules to particular target device configuration rules. Since this step is done manually there is room for human error in the process.
Printouts of Excel spreadsheets and text files are given to appropriate consultants to configure each component of the network. Printouts are difficult to carry out and produce since the size of the spreadsheets are very large. The layout of the spreadsheet is also important because the consultant using the rules will have to easily make sense of it.
· Lacks reporting and audit trails
Documentation is written up in Word, this is also a complex task which involves manually writing up the documentation. This form of documentation is not efficient and lacks ease of understanding. When changes need to be made to existing infrastructures the entire process needs to be carried out. Under the current process it is difficult to keep track of changes and keep up to date documentation of dynamic infrastructures.
Finally, the current process is not a very efficient one, there is room for improvement providing the right technologies are used and the correct tool is developed. The solution involves eliminating these problems and reducing the inefficiencies to a minimal.
The proposed system will automate the current process discussed above. Some of the main features the proposed system will be addressing are discussed below.
· Visual and easy to use
Optimation require a system which is visual and easy to use in terms of designing, implementing and documenting a system. The application will aim to automate the current process. A visual representation will be fed into the system, rules {e.g. naming conventions} relating to the representation will then be automatically generated and thereafter the system will produce output that will be used to configure specific components of the infrastructure.
· Generic and modularised
The system must be as generic as possible; it should not only be limited to computer networks and firewalls. Being generic also requires the system to be device independent, if new technologies are introduced to the company, the system must be able to adapt easily. In order to meet these requirements the development of the application is broken up into modules. Each module is independent of each other but all modules should work together to produce the end result.
· Easily updateable and provide documentation
The application must be able to document changes and produce reports. The system must have a feature which produces a visual easy to understand report to management. Each change made to the design of a system must be documented, this helps keep an audit trail.
· Secure and Future Proof
Last but not least, the application must be secure and reliable. It must be a robust solution that can easily be upgraded to be compatible with future technologies.
The newly developed application will provide the following benefits to Optimation:
· Increase profit margins
The automated process reduces the workload of expensive highly skilled consultants. This will lead to lower labour costs for Optimation. These highly skilled consultants can be used to take on more challenging roles such as the actual design of the system and the maintenance of proposed systems.
· Increase competitive advantage
The application allows for collaboration of team members to participate in design and implementation, this provides a larger knowledge base and hence a more specialised solution.
· Improve the quality and consistency of on-going maintenance
Visual representation of the system will allow the user to easily make changes to the configuration of the system. This will make on-going maintenance a much easier task. The Company can also spend more time on the quality of the solution rather than the process of designing it.
· Increase staff satisfaction
Automating the current process reduces the amount of manual work required and allows more focus on the challenging and creative aspects of the solution.
· Improve staff up-skilling
The application will be easily understood. It will be interactive and very user-friendly. These features can be used as a tool with which to train staff members about the business of Optimation and will also get them to easily understand the process of designing systems.
The development of the system has been broken down into two phases; phase one and future phases. Since a lot more functionality can be added onto the solution as time goes on, the future phases cater for enhancements to the system.
Phase one:
Phase one has been divided further into 5 stages:
Stage 1 – This stage involves extracting information from a diagram and inputting it into LaNina. This process will be done automatically. Besides the information from the diagram the user will also need to add other infrastructure information that cannot be represented in diagrams. The input of other infrastructure information will be manual.
Stage 2 – This stage involves structuring the information we have captured from the diagram and the user. The information will be logically stored so that we can easily access this information for further processing or use.
Stage 3 – Here we intend designing a user friendly good looking user interface for the user to interact with. The user should easily be able to navigate through the program and find it easy to access all the functionality within the system.
The interfaces that the user will use to add in other relevant information will also be defined at this stage.
Stage 4 - The configuration engine is the engine through which all the rules will be processed. The engine will use all the rules obtained from Stage 1 to create device specific rules. These rules will be used to program the network devices involved in the system.
The configuration of network devices will be done manually using the rules produced by LaNina.
Stage 5 - The user will also be able to store information in an XML format or in the SQL Database. This stage involves giving the user a place to store the information. Once in an XML format the data will be stored in an XML file. The user will be able to extract information either in XML format or from the SQL database.
Future Phases:
Future phases can contain features such as ability to reverse engineer the above process. The system should be able to take in device specific rules already programmed into components and based on these rules generate a visual representation of the system. Other features can also be creating a design tool as part of the system. By making the design part of the system the entire system can be packaged and used as a stand alone application. The application can also be web enabled to allow remote access. This would allow consultants to view documentation from the client’s site. These extra features along with many others can make up the future phases of the project.
