Chapter 4. Definition and Preparation

This chapter describes the definition and preparation activities used to identify areas in which to deploy N1 Grid solutions. This chapter is designed to help you see that Sun's N1 Grid software offerings do not necessarily change how you design, assemble, and deploy services they merely simplify and provide a means to improve and automate those activities.

Your organization's unique operational capabilities and physical IT environment will help you define what N1 Grid solution engagement you should undertake first. After a discussion of architecture to introduce some common frameworks and definitions used throughout this book, this chapter helps you define where the N1 Grid architecture makes sense in your environment. After presenting the virtualization options that were available in the past, the section introducing virtualization describes and contrasts the virtualization options available today. The section on provisioning describes how different concepts and tools are appropriate for automating provisioning activities for the different elements in your data center. The section on mobility extends the concept of provisioning to include beneficial situations in which data center services can be easily moved among the data center elements that host them. The final section in this chapter examines the operational capability of the people, processes, and tools in a data center as a means to assess the capability to support virtualized, mobile data center services.

The N1 Grid architecture helps you reduce the major sources of IT cost (FIGURE 4-1) by improving the processes and making people more productive. Year after year in business journals and academic studies, people and processes have been measured as the major sources of cost and downtime in a data center.

Figure 4-1. Major Sources of IT Costs

It is striking how these extreme ratios have remained relatively consistent over time, yet companies often look to new technology to deliver extra data center efficiency or new hardware to reduce cost. Clearly, there is much to be gained by focusing on operations.

A key aspect of an N1 Grid strategy is finding the answers to these business questions:

• What are the most troublesome management spots in the data center?

• Have misconfigured deployments cost your company downtime or revenue?

• Can the infrastructure respond quickly and scale?

• How fast can your company deploy additional servers and software images?

• Where do the lost computing resources reside?

• How much can you reduce cost and complexity with a common provisioning infrastructure that works across your heterogeneous data center environments?

Answering questions like these is a prerequisite for prioritizing and focusing N1 Grid solution deployment activities and forms baseline considerations to describe and solve the business problem space. TABLE 4-1 includes top critical-to-quality factors (CTQs) identified by the IT community and shows how the N1 Grid vision, architecture, and products address them.

Table 4-1. N1 Grid Vision, Architecture, and Product Effects on Business CTQs

Business CTQ	N1 Grid Vision	N1 Grid Architecture	N1 Grid Software
Reduce complexity	Manage services, not servers	Reduces customer engineering and integration	N1 Grid Provisioning Server images, N1 Grid Provisioning Server plans, N1 Grid Data Services Platform configurations, and Sun Java Enterprise system
Reduce cost	Do more with less	Increases resource utilization through higher service density on servers, heterogeneous pools and management, inexpensive and integrated platforms and applications	Solaris™ 10 Zones, blades, N1 Grid containers, Sun Java Enterprise System, Sun Java™ Desktop System, and Sun Ray™ Ultra-Thin clients
Decrease time to market	Gain advantages through process, rapid repurposing, and accelerated service life cycle	Works with proven and tested builds, automates provisioning of underlying resources, exact copy of an earlier environment	N1 Grid Provisioning Server and N1 Grid Service Provisioning System
Improve service level agreements	Use policy-based optimization	Monitors and manages service containers, not servers	Easily integrated with standard observability products and Sun's proactive, preventive, and preemptive offerings
Enable utility computing	Use what is needed, measure what is used	Develops a tighter relationship between provisioning and demand curves	Sun Server and Storage Power Units, SRS NetConnect, blades, Sun StorEdge™ arrays, Solaris Resource Manager accounting (easily integrated with third-party products)
Extract value from business continuity resources	Install proven and tested components and automate the installation of exact copies of production environments	Uses rapid repurposing to enable business continuity resources to be used for other business purposes, until actually needed	Supported by N1 Grid software products

Whether in pursuit of infrastructure-level efficiency improvements or transforming these capabilities into dynamic strategic business assets, the N1 Grid software provides the tools to execute processes to assist in managing data center activities for the hardware life cycle, software loads, service descriptions, and fault diagnosis and repair. The N1 Grid software supports the elevation of operation and business focus to services and service levels, rather than server and infrastructure operations or management.