The Rack manager
Those of you who've worked in an environment with more than a handful
of systems to manage will know that the management of those systems
is about more than just being able to ping them at 5 minute intervals.
There is a lot of importance around keeping the paperwork straight on
who owns them (either literally or figuratively), what to do if they
suffer an issue and how they are configured. All of this is now more
commonly subsumed under the heading of a CMDB in the ITIL framework many
organisations model their systems management under.
This project then started as a simple first step beyond recording
such data in a spreadsheet (the starting point most places begin
from) and offers a few "nice to have" extras such as views of what
is in the racks and cabinets in your data centre. Over time it has
expanded its scope somewhat and now offers much more than a simple
spreadsheet will ever offer and much more simply and maintainably.
It does in fact perform most of the functions of an ITIL CMDB but
at low man-hours cost and without losing sight of physical racks
and systems it is managing.
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