Recently, we had the pleasure of working with a university that prides itself as being one of the leading institutions worldwide, and boasts having over 6,000 academic staff members. It further regards itself on having a highly efficient IT department that supports both staff and students alike.
"In our section, we support all voice and data networks that span the main campus as well as all external locations," explained the head of network services.
"Recently," he continued, "during an internal audit, we discovered that our administrators were dedicating an inordinate amount of time to manually allocating networks. Despite their best efforts to document every change, troubleshooting problems remained a lengthy and arduous process."
As a university endowed with considerable intellectual resources, they recognized the need for an intelligent IP address management (IPAM) solution to establish a standardized workflow – complete with error handling procedures.
comdivision's automation specialist, Matthias Eisner, recommended using VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator, which is integral to the foundation solution, and integrating the externally developed IPAM using the REST API. "We proposed to the customer the implementation of the base automation infrastructure using Aria Automation in conjunction with Aria Orchestrator," said Eisner.
With Aria Automation, one can establish and orchestrate a self-service and governance solution across a multi-cloud environment. Everything can be defined as code. Consequently, thanks to the API-first approach to delivering cloud automation, not only can policies and blueprints be automatically assigned, but custom, self-developed applications can also be integrated, including the IPAM we proposed.
The IPAM was seamlessly integrated with Aria Automation. Extensive testing revealed that the system significantly freed up resources needed elsewhere. "Having a custom IPAM integration, complete with appropriate error handling and additional verification, strengthens the solution's success and reduces the administrative interaction required," stated the head of network services.
