Patent ID: 9654346
Date: 2017-05-16
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. A method for automatically deploying a network design, the method comprising: receiving a network design at a computing device, wherein the network design includes a designed physical network topology of a plurality of hardware devices physically installed, or to be physically installed, in a network and a separate logical configuration to be deployed over the hardware devices in the network; electronically discovering, by the computing device, an actual physical network topology of hardware devices that have been physically installed in the network, the discovering including identifying a physical interconnection among two or more physically installed hardware devices in the network; validating that the actual physical network topology of physically installed hardware devices correctly corresponds to the designed physical network topology in the network design, wherein the validating includes determining that the identified physical interconnection matches a physical interconnection specified in the designed physical network topology in the network design; deploying, by the computing device, the logical configuration over the plurality of physically installed hardware devices of the network responsive to validation that the actual physical network topology of physically installed hardware devices correctly corresponds to the designed physical network topology in the network design, wherein deploying the logical configuration over the network includes automatically executing a computer command to deploy the logical configuration over the physically installed hardware devices, the deployment involving setting or changing a logical configuration parameter of one or more selected from: network zoning, network clustering, network load balancing, network bandwidth utilization, network resource allocation, a network routing rule, a redundant or alternative network data path, a network identifier of one or more of the hardware devices in the network, and/or a RAID level of one or more of the hardware devices in the network; and electronically discovering a network parameter in the network having the deployed logical configuration and validating, based on the network parameter, that the deployed logical configuration on the network correctly corresponds to the logical configuration of the network design.