We all have ideas we all come up with daily based on customer interactions, self-learning or working with engineering. But the chance to make one of those ideas a reality is sometimes hard and they tend to end up in a notebook or whiteboard and no progress made. Ever quarter at Pure Storage we hold an internal Hackathon that encourages anyone to participate and create something unique. One of our corporate values is called “Customer First” which is all about creating a solution that focuses on providing business value to our customers and partners. Now that can mean a wide variety of things but the core concept is all about enabling

Our Hackathon’s are held over a 2-day period in a common area to allow teams to collaborate on their ideas. I always try to participant but sometimes it is just not possible with project timelines. But this one I just couldn’t pass up to work on my idea I’ve had in my notebook for 5 months.

Project Idea

FlashArray Management and Auto-Script Generation for PowerShell ISE. The key here is Auto-Script Generation by visually being able to view the different objects of the FlashArray and simply click on them to create a working script that can then be furthered built out or shared.

Objectives

  • Create a tool that helps customers/partners auto-generate script code.
  • Provide an integration example for how developers & scripters can add support for FlashArray.

Features

  • Ability to add multiple FlashArray’s in the ISE Add-on to manage.
  • Retrieve FlashArray information
    • Array attributes — Name, Purity version, REST version, username and role.
    • Hosts — Name, connectivity protocol and # of ports.
    • Volumes — Name and # of snapshots.
    • Snapshots — Name
  • Automatically generate the script as users click on objects in the GUI.

Demonstration

 

The next features I plan to work on include:

  • Context menus for Hosts, Volumes and Snapshots — Right-click on an object and display different actions to perform.
  • UI scaling — Ensure all controls scale to a minimum and maximum resolution.
  • Drag-n-drop support — Select an object and drag to the ISE Editor.
  • Error Handling
  • Session State — When the user loads the ISE Add-on reload the latest connected FlashArrays.

 

This is why I love working at Pure Storage, we get to be creative every day.

Cheers,
Barkz

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