If you are not familiar with Visio Cafe - its a great resource for computer stencils (think Powerpoint shapes except smarter). VSD Grafx Inc, that supports this open source site - provides many stencils of configurable computer objects to most of the main systems vendors today including IBM, EMC, HP and a host of others. I asked Trevor Foster a founder of VSD what their business model was and he indicated that clients pay VSD to build standard computing visio objects for them. They did this so that sales and presales engineering teams could rapidly build architectures and put quotes together. We discussed the interesting idea that in many cases these visio diagrams ended up in Powepoint sales pesentations or word documents. In other words their usefulness as an intelligent diagram ended! My first thought was - maybe we should try to encourage a more “flow through” practice.

The range of configurable systems on Visio Cafe is substantial and there are some benefits to staying with their recommended standards. For large diagrams - they avoid the use of bit mapped objects that make file sizes large - and of course servers can be specifically configured. In terms of adopting these files into a common computing model I have a number of observations -

- If you regularly buy systems from vendors, why not request them to give you a one to one visio configuration for every server or system? It seems a waste to re build it if in fact it was configured like this in the first place!
- specify how you want your visio specifications from suppliers - then incorporate these into a larger common enterprise model
- identify your own critical computing data set - IP address,relevant asset tag location and so on. To avoid updating object data by hand you may need to delete “shape data” and create your own that lines up with for instance your asset spreadsheets
- whilst these stencils are hardware configurable there are many more specific options for virtualization that are tightly linked to the chip/memory/IO variable set - making the investment once in modeling this properly - then building a common template from that analysis is probably a good idea

One of the key benefits of this approach is that with a little teamwork from suppliers ongoing systems documentation can be made a great deal easier - but you still need an overall strategy to make sure you harness the opportunity.