Data Center Floorplan - Cabinets - Servers - Assets

[John]

Hello All,

I have a Visio Drawing of our Data Center Floorplan. I want to be able to
click on the top of one of the Cabinets (for example YK1A6) which will then
bring up a front view picture (another Visio Drawing) of that cabinet
(YK1A6). So I need to link the YK1A6 Cabinet in the floorplan Vision Drawing
to the front view Visio Drawing I have of the same YK1A6 Cabinet. How do I go
about doing this? Then when I have the front view of Cabinet YK1A6 displayed
I want to be able to click on a server in that cabinet (such as YKASCSD) and
that will be bring up all the data on that asset. Now the asset record for
the YKASCSD server is in Remedy (a call-center/helpdesk application). So I
would need to know how to link the YKASCSD server in Cabinet YK1A6 to the
asset record in Remedy (if possible). And of course be able to search (I
don't know if Visio has a search cabability). Thank you and I apologize for
such a long post.

John B. Beck

 

[Al Edlund]

Well,,
For years they've been talking about top-down design, but IMHO you have some
basics to address first. You haven't said what platform you're writing in,
but I'd play in a VBA sandbox where possible. I'd start by demonstrating
that I can in fact execute a query (select statement, CRUD comes later) to
read a record from Remedy. You also didn't mention what platform it is
running on for data (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc.). If you can't find a
query engine you might consider using SQL server to replicate a fixed point
image to work with since asset usually isn't very volatile. Once you have
the asset thing down you can start looking at how to automate the rack
drawings for your intermediate data, and then it is as simple as using
hyperlink to open the rack drawings.
Your desire to just use a front view is ok for a beginning, but
asset/connectivity require more than an orthoginal view. You might want to
consider functional views for status and cabling, since new technologies
such as blade servers are driving additional requirements.
al
ps it's doable.

 

[John Marshall, MVP]

Am I oversimplifying it or is he just looking for an overview Visio drawing
with hyperlinks to the detailed front view drawings and each front view has
a collection of ShapeData populated from some intermediary table from
Remedy? No real code necessary.

John... Visio MVP

Need stencils or ideas? http://visio.mvps.org/3rdparty.htm
Need VBA examples? http://visio.mvps.org/VBA.htm
Visio Wishlist http://visio.mvps.org/wish_list.htm

 

[Al Edlund]

If it were that I would have sent him over here

http://www.visiotoolbox.com/partnerproducts.aspx

for the little overhead demo that the guys at bVisual put together. The part
that caught my interest is in the desire to link it to Remedy, which brings
a lot
of other interesting questions (Can datarecordsets link to the underlying
infrastructure?,
What's a fallback plan if the DB manager can't link?, How many racks/rows
are needed
in the solution set?, etc.) Of course if he doesn't need
the data linking he can always fill a spreadsheet and use that for the data
source.

Al