OneNet has further expanded its university intern program this year by including a team of Software Engineering undergraduates from Massey’s Albany campus.
The team has been working closely with OneNet’s in-house engineers, delivering new software product for managing the inventory and configuration of their data centres.
"The Datacentre Management Toolkit utilises the latest in modern web technologies to deliver an interactive visual representation of data centre assets," says Hal Smith Stevens, Software Team Leader, OneNet Limited.
Stevens says engineers are able to use their tablets and phones to interact with features such as "drag n’ drop" rack positioning and one-touch connectivity editing.
“One benefit of the new tool is clear," Stevens explains, "the ease of data entry is maximising productivity while also maintaining a high level of data integrity in real time.
"But the tool also serves another use case – analysis. Being able to view connectivity maps between hardware is invaluable in many scenarios from handling an outage through to planning an upgrade.
"Easily viewing all hardware affected by an outage and a list of all affected clients allows engineers to move quickly to the root of the cause."
The system, meanwhile, could be configured to automatically email notifications to all those affected, a move Stevens believes helps "free up" engineers to help in solving the issue at hand.
"This is just one example of the analytical power this app puts at an engineer’s fingertips in its current state," he adds.
"The Massey team members learnt invaluable lessons and transferable skills that they will carry with them out into the industry."
According to Stevens, some team members have already been offered positions working specifically with the skill set they’ve acquired on this project, while next year’s team will inherit a "lively code base full of potential, rich with cutting-edge technologies and good, solid architectural planning."
"They will face the rigour of user testing and feedback phases as the product is fully adopted by the OneNet engineers and integrated into their day-to-day processes," he adds.