Model-based automation for hardware provisioning in IT infrastructure

An IT infrastructure comprises both hardware and software resources. While much progress has been made on automating the provisioning of software resources, provisioning hardware resources continues to use labor-intensive manual processes. For example, hardware provisioning tasks including most of the peripheral tasks, such as designing the system architecture, planning the tasks to deploy on it, describing the operational procedures, and managing the progress of hardware deployment, remain a manual process despite being amenable to automation. To address these problems, this paper presents a model-based approach to automating hardware provisioning. First, we describe a specification to define a hardware system in the form of a desired state model. Second, we propose a scheme to generate operational procedures to deploy the system detailing how we handle dependencies and address issues of practical importance useful to improve worker productivity. Third, through a case study involving hardware provisioning for a private cloud platform, we show the benefits accrued through our scheme, which not only addresses the issues with peripheral administrative tasks but also the practical operations by supporting improved operational procedures. Our system is implemented in Java. We qualitatively evaluate our solution alluding to how reusability can be enhanced, and also elicit its current limitations providing insights into ongoing work to address these limitations.