Active IQ Unified Manager Discussions

WFA POC

chao
4,606 Views

Hi Sir

IHAC have interesting in WFA.  they want to develop automatic storage manager system to their customer.  (for example, CIFS/NFS volume create, size modification. Of coz, managed by application/approval process). 

They want to do POC.  How could we start?  For example.  how to apply demo license and where we could download the software? is there already a POC guide?

Your advices are appreciated.

Thanks and Best Regards!

TC

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

yaronh
4,606 Views

Hi TC,

Well, let's take it in stride:

First, we thank you for your interest.

Regarding POC - You've just started. The first step is to define what would be the content of the POC

(Which flow and processes we'd like to implement in WFA as part of it).

As Netapp personnel you can download WFA from the internal link that we posted at the release note.

For license, please contact me or Kevin Hill (From RTP) via email for a temp license and we will issue one.

I suggest we take this offline and setup a quick discussion for moving onwards.

Hope that answered the question.

Yaron Haimsohn

WFA team

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6 REPLIES 6

yaronh
4,607 Views

Hi TC,

Well, let's take it in stride:

First, we thank you for your interest.

Regarding POC - You've just started. The first step is to define what would be the content of the POC

(Which flow and processes we'd like to implement in WFA as part of it).

As Netapp personnel you can download WFA from the internal link that we posted at the release note.

For license, please contact me or Kevin Hill (From RTP) via email for a temp license and we will issue one.

I suggest we take this offline and setup a quick discussion for moving onwards.

Hope that answered the question.

Yaron Haimsohn

WFA team

chao
4,606 Views

It’s cool!  I will talk with customer for their requirement and expectation.

Mainly customer want to develop a storage management Portal.  Their end user could issue an application to request space (create a volume for CIFS/NFS) and extend the space if necessary.  If approved, the operatations will do automatically.  I believe WFA could help.

A quick question:  Could WFA create a set of scripts (Perl or Powershell) for Portal to manage filer directly without WFA running?  Or WFA must be running and stay with Portal together to manage the filer (without WFA running)?  In the beginning,  customer consider to let Portal to use API directly.  To consider WFA should save coding time, I recommend the WFA.  But customer will still develop a Portal.  So I am thinking how WFA could help them more.

BR

TC

bdave
4,606 Views

If everything the customer wants to do is possible via WFA, and so far just creating or extending CIFS shares or NFS exports can be completely self-contained by WFA, there's no need for a portal.  WFA can be used as the portal.  Operators can be defined in WFA so that they can execute workflows in a locked-down fashion.  WFA can prompt the operators for the information it needs via a web interface.

But, if the customer is looking at creating a larger cloud orchestration engine that does application provisioning, etc, as well as storage provisioning, they may want to use something besides WFA.  In that case, WFA can still be useful.  WFA provides an easy, storage-centric framework with a lot of example workflows that can be edited to create whatever the customer wants to automate.  Then, a larger cloud orchestration engine can call specific workflows programmatically, like an operator would do, passing input variables to WFA, through a Web Services interface (SOAP interface).  The cloud orchestration engine can also check the status of workflow execution, and get return variables passed back to it after workflows finish executing. 

For the latter method, check out Yaron's Web Services Primer doc.  It's posted in this WFA Communities website.  It gives some great examples on how to use the Web Services interface of WFA.

Hope this helps,

Dave

hill
4,606 Views

Hi TC,

As Dave mentioned, it's possible to use WFA's Web Services interface to enable any type of "portal" the customer might want to use... 3rd party or their own.  I would also argue that the other benefits that WFA would provide is Access Control for anyone trying to automate storage management... regardless of if the user initiating a workflow does so via the WFA Portal or via Web Services, they are still authenticated to see if they are able to initiate that workflow.  Also WFA keeps track of all executions, so it's logging capabilities might also be desirable.

In any case, I believe WFA would be of benefit to your customer as you've already indicated.

Please reach out to me at hill@netapp.com and both Dave and I would be happy to help get you what you need to get a POC going for your customer.

Hope this helps,

Kevin

chao
4,606 Views

Hi Sir

Thanks a lot for your support.  I want to install one testing WFA in our Lab in order to be familiar with it.  Would you please give me a license? chao@netapp.com

I am thinking how to leverage WFA to help customer. It sounds that in current phase, customer request are mostly about space/volume auto-management.   Customer will still develop a Portal (in Chinese and will also manage 3rd party storages) rather to use WFA directly.

I want to know if WFA could create a set of scripts for their own Portal to control filers directly (bypass the WFA)?   The another choice is the portal call WFA web service to control the filers (WFA must be running).   Please advise.

Thanks and Best Regards!

TC

vsv
NetApp
4,606 Views

Hi TC,

As said before ,customer can use WFA's Web Services interface to integrate with "portal" and manage the NetApp storage management needs. That said, WFA is not a framework for scripts generation to be used independently with any external software. So, customer will have to use WFA web services and have it managed from the portal. So, the choice for the customer is to call the WFA web service from the external portal and manage the storage tasks ..

For getting hold of WFA 1.1 and for licensing needs, please follow the details as mentioned @ https://communities.netapp.com/message/75713#75713

We will email you the the license and related details on how to register the same with WFA software

Regards,

Vishwas

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