Engineering a Holistic Solution for Efficient Storage Devices Management
Executive Summary
The customer’s system administrators were facing problems as they had to manually manage the entire storage environment. It also created problems scaling the infrastructure as this manual approach became a hindrance managing the routine operations.
Crest Data solved these challenges by offering product engineering services to develop a Puppet module that utilized the web proxy REST APIs. This module automated the entire manual hardware management into a streamlined process through a single Puppet master node. This module allowed system admin to easily write storage operation configs without going into the complexities of web proxy REST API calls.
About the Customer
The customer is one of the leading hybrid cloud data services and data management companies and has ranked in the Fortune 500 since 2012. The customer offers hybrid cloud data services for management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments.
Proposed Solution
The customer’s storage manager software provided essential management for its Storage Devices, but it posed significant operational hurdles.
System administrators managing the customer’s storage environment were facing operation hurdles as all storage devices management was being manually handled. But with scaling of infrastructure, it became difficult to micromanage various tasks like creation, modification, and deletion of storage pools, volumes, host and LUN mappings.
Without a unified platform to manage these complex operations, it was getting difficult to scale large-scale storage infrastructures efficiently.
Outcomes & Success Metrics
To solve this, the Puppet module was developed for the customer to manage customer’s storage devices. This solution extensively used web proxy REST APIs to use the power of customer’s configuration management capabilities to manage storage devices.
This module helped automating storage operations on large number storage devices from a single Puppet master node using a catalogue of operations that can be applied on multiple storage devices.
Centralized Control: A single Puppet master node allowed administrators to manage a large number of storage devices.
Declarative Language: Administrators could easily write human readable storage operations configuration code that reduced the complexity of handling REST API calls.
Holistic Dashboard: A centralized dashboard compatible with Puppet Enterprise, was able to actively track the status of all agent nodes efficiently.
The Crest Difference
The module provided immense benefits by efficiently managing the storage devices by undertaking below steps:
- Automated install, upgrade and removal of customer’s web proxy software.
- Automate the configurations like creation, modification and deletion of storage pools and volumes.
- Host and LUN mappings and Consistency Groups.
- Automated the Volume Snapshots configuration management.
- Automated upgrades of Storage System Controller firmware and NVRAM firmware.
- Automated Flash Cache configuration management.
- Application of the configurations in specified order of dependency.
About Crest Data
Crest Data is a data and AI-first product engineering and technology solutions provider with deep expertise in cloud and AI, cybersecurity, observability, data analytics, and workflow automation. In this case study, Crest Data applied its CloudOps and DevSecOps capabilities to help the customer migrate from on-prem infrastructure to a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient AWS environment, supported by infrastructure automation and proactive monitoring.
With 1,200+ experts and a track record of 5,500+ successful projects across 150+ global customers, and backed by strong partnerships with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Datadog, Dynatrace, ServiceNow, and NetApp, Crest Data delivers outcome-focused solutions that strengthen security, improve platform reliability, and enable sustainable digital growth.
