About RAIV (Rack And Inventory Viewer)
The problem: In an environment with a rapidly growing amount of inventory (such as servers here at the OSL) its important to stay organized and efficient. A good, centralized inventory solution would be a great help in a lot of ways. Everyday inventory information is tracked down and used. In an emergency situation, no one wants to spend time tracking down the information needed to fix the problem, the information needs to be as quickly accessible as possible. On top of that is the associated learning curve for new employees. There are lots of benefits from a good inventory system. Of course, this problem is not specific to servers and the benefits apply to any operation with inventory to track.
The solution: The idea behind RAIV is to create a web-based, modular, and flexible tool to track inventory and the information associated with that inventory. This problem applies to a wide range of operations with an even wider range of inventory and information to track. RAIV 's mission is to reflect this diversity in a flexible, easy-to-use manner. In other words, our goal for RAIV is to be able to track data center inventory here at the OSL just as well as it could track Mom and Pop's local grocery store inventory.
Some of the features proposed for RAIV's first release are:
- The inventory system with appropriate objects (servers, racks, virtual machines, etc)
- Rackview - will provide a graphical representation of the inventory, similar to here
. Notice that the graph is clickable, to scale down to more detail.
- A changelog module will help administrators track changes made to inventory, whether a specific item or group of items.
- A meta-info module will allow tagging of items into categories. For example, "This server is part of the Mozilla group, along with these people"
- A customer relationship management (CRM) module will track people and their associations with inventory.
- There are more features proposed for the first release and tons more discussed as future advancements of RAIV.
As one may imagine, there are a lot of possibilities for extensions from such an inventory system. For example, the inventory information must come from somewhere, so why not integrate a third party tool and populate it automatically. Another example might be creating your own inventory objects to be tracked. Our goal is to create a strong modular foundation for RAIV so that it is as extensible and scalable as possible and so third party tools can be easily integrated.
