DEFINING AND USING TEMPLATES IN CONFIGURING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENTS

• US 20090171705A1
• Filed: 12/28/2007
• Published: 07/02/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 12/28/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: WOOD, Brian O., McCONNELL, Tim A., BOBAK, Mythili K., SWANSON, Michael D.
• Granted Patent: US 8,751,283 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/7
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/10 Requirements analysis; Specification techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06316 Sequencing of tasks or work
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/0633 Workflow analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/067 Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/103 Workflow collaboration or project management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/188 Electronic negotiation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0843 based on generic templates
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0879 Manual configuration through operator

Abstract

Templates are provided and used in an Information Technology (IT) environment. A template represents a pattern of resources and resource relationships of the IT environment. Templates are applied to automatically generate recommendations of programmatic representations of artifacts of the IT environment. The artifacts include Recovery Segments, Redundancy Groups, Business Resilience Manager deployment configurations and/or resource pairing represented by relationship data stores, as examples.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method of facilitating configuration of an information technology (IT) environment, the computer-implemented method comprising:

obtaining a template for an IT environment, said template representing a pattern of resources and resource relationships of the IT environment; and

applying the template to automatically generate a recommendation of a programmatic representation of an artifact of the IT environment.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the pattern represents a best practice associated with the artifact to be generated.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the artifact comprises one of a Recovery Segment, a Redundancy Group, a business resilience manager deployment configuration, or a resource pairing represented by a relationship data store.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the template comprises a definition template or a deployment template.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 4, wherein the definition template provides direction of how to define the artifact, and the deployment template provides direction of where to place the artifact.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the obtaining comprises defining a plurality of templates for the IT environment, each template representing a pattern of resources and resource relationships, an wherein the plurality of templates comprise at least one of one or more definition templates or one or more deployment templates.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising modifying the template.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising associating with the template one or more characteristics of the artifact.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, wherein the one or more characteristics comprise property value pairs for resource artifacts or trigger values for relationship artifacts.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the obtaining comprises at least one of:

receiving from a vendor the template representing best practices;

defining the template;

defining the template as a result of modifying a vendor provided template;

or

retrieving an open source provided template.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the obtaining comprises:

searching a data store of templates for a list of one or more templates that meets one or more predefined criteria associated with the artifact; and

selecting from the list a template to be applied.

12. The computer-implemented method of claim 11, further comprising modifying the selected template, and wherein the modified template is the template to be applied.

13. The computer-implemented method of claim 11, wherein the applying comprises applying pattern matching on the selected template and a representation of a resource topology to obtain a recommended definition of the artifact.

14. The computer-implemented method of claim 13, wherein the resource topology comprises one of a resource graph and a recovery segment.

15. A system of facilitating configuration of an information technology (IT) environment, the system comprising:

a memory having a template for an IT environment, said template representing a pattern of resources and resource relationships of the IT environment; and

at least one processor to apply the template to automatically generate a recommendation of a programmatic representation of an artifact of the IT environment.

16. The system of claim 15, wherein the pattern represents a best practice associated with the artifact to be generated.

17. The system of claim 15, wherein the template comprises a definition template or a deployment template.

18. An article of manufacture comprising:

at least one computer usable medium having computer readable program code logic to facilitate configuration of an information technology (IT) environment, said computer readable program code logic when executing performing the following;

obtaining a template for an IT environment, said template representing a pattern of resources and resource relationships of the IT environment; and

applying the template to automatically generate a recommendation of a programmatic representation of an artifact of the IT environment.

19. The article of manufacture of claim 18, wherein the pattern represents a best practice associated with the artifact to be generated.

20. The article of manufacture of claim 18, wherein the obtaining comprises:

searching a data store of templates for a list of one or more templates that meets one or more predefined criteria associated with the artifact; and

selecting from the list a template to be applied.