Patent ID: 7587713

Claim:
A method for installing software components of a data storage management system including data storage management server software as part of the software components, comprising the following computer-executed steps: initiating the installation of a database, which is a repository representative of a first software component of the data storage management system, wherein the repository includes tabular data entries; wherein the data storage management system comprises a plurality of software components and manages a data storage environment, the data storage environment comprising a plurality of computers and a data storage system, the data storage system comprising a plurality of storage devices; wherein each component of the data storage system to be installed has a set of questions to be answered by a user or the system; deducing, for each question of the set of questions, whether the guest ion is determinable from the system without user input through the use of a sharability and params token; wherein the sharability token defines whether the answer to a question is usable between components and the params token contains a directive for an install utility to perform a system task; supplementing the information deduced from the system by soliciting further installation information from user input; using the user input to populate selected ones of the tabular data entries that are used to function in a state machine capacity to enforce rules and order of installation of further software components of the data storage management system without further user intervention, wherein the selected ones of said tabular data entries populated by the user comprise answers to questions that are indicated to be shamble and shared between selected ones of said software components.