Target Analysis


You have defined how you are going to use the N1 Grid in your environment. You have mobilized the support of your business and architecture teams and gathered the first round of traceable and measurable requirements that define the desired future state. You have established business metrics and baselines for use cases and processes you are going to automate, replace, and alter as a result of your N1 Grid solution. Now, you must analyze your environment and design the solution based on those requirements.

How do you choose between the many architectures and solutions your group might create? What are some of the methods you can use to keep your effort on track, to determine if you are meeting your goals, and to examine whether your organization is capable of delivering or operating the final solution?

There are a few typical drivers that can help you determine where you want to target the N1 Grid. This section reviews those drivers from the perspective of using them to analyze your solution.

Brownfield or Greenfield

This target helps to guide the solution component functionality by clearly constraining the accessed layers and the product functionality. For the purpose of this example, a greenfield environment is one with no existing development, presenting a completely blank slate in which to architect a solution. In contrast, a brownfield environment can have already existing services, and the architecture must take that running environment into account when a new service or solution is developed. Examples of brownfield constraints are:

  • Use or elimination of virtualization because of existing organizational silos or network architecture

  • Need to retain existing processes for operating system and hardware provisioning

  • Storage and file system naming convention conflicts that make it impossible for some services to be mobile

While greenfield environments can establish a standard for "done right once" mobile services, they can also have the same constraints as brownfield environments if services are simply brought over without instilling or imposing the types of common information model, architectural decomposition analysis, and security and policy factors that make the N1 Grid solution benefits possible.

Although most of these considerations are expressed in the form of requirements and constraints, understanding what layers of the stack are being affected and how that deployable entity will impact people, processes, and technology resources will help guide the choice between different possible solutions. There is value and less organizational disruption in gradually introducing a new way of designing and provisioning into an existing environment, perhaps using an N1 Grid solution for a new business service to demonstrate success and then making a business decision to use N1 Grid solutions for all future new services. After the new services life cycles are smoothly enabled using N1 Grid, you can turn your attention to guide the appropriate facets of existing services into the new mobile service centric environment. An example of this attention might be a decision to use the N1 Grid SPS software to implement all future updates.

Heterogeneous or Specific Environments

The N1 Grid technology works in heterogeneous environments, but you might choose to deploy it initially in something more specific (for instance, for a certain server type, a particular set of applications, or all of the servers connected to a particular switch). It is important that the solution is not so focused on the particular environment into which it will be deployed that it is not extensible to the rest of your environment. Use cases are a good mechanism to examine and test your solutions for this type of shortfall. Ask yourself whether use cases that use your specific solution in other parts of your environment can be successfully completed or at least plausibly contemplated to work in your environment as a whole.

Sun's N1 Grid solution is immediately implementable in heterogeneous environments, so a Sun-only or a Windows-only N1 Grid solution can be implemented regardless of the composition of the environment.

Efficiency

Have there been too many outages when tested services are promoted to the production environment (for instance, some key step or semicolon in a configuration file is missed, so the service fails)? Does it take too long to set up a server or service, and is it set up differently depending on who is doing the setup? It is important to remember that N1 Grid solutions both enable and require operational maturity. The N1 Grid software cannot automate a process that does not exist or control activities in an environment that is chaotic. In the correct environment, the N1 Grid software can eliminate manual errors by automating the deployment of tested builds and ensuring that they reach the targets to which they have been assigned. An N1 Grid solution cannot speed up the time it takes bits to flow through an Ethernet cable, but it can reduce the time it takes to set up services after the request has been made to do so.

Chapter 4 outlined other areas of efficiency to consider. It defined an initial focus on applying the N1 Grid architecture principles to gain operational efficiency and business value. Nevertheless, process analysis and operational maturity are good mechanisms to examine your solutions for the following gaps:

  • Are you automating the correct layers of the stack?

  • Are the correct processes being created and the correct useful metrics being reported?

  • Are you capable of operating the solution you are designing?

Because of the natural inclusion of people, process, and technology, N1 Grid solutions are a great catalyst to help organizations identify ways to increase efficiency.

Architectural Improvement

This book discusses how N1 Grid solutions can maximize the value of services that are decomposed into completely mobile and maximally flexible layers and tiers. In this way, an important consideration for any solution is its use of these architectural principles and traceable requirements that link the final product, processes, and people aspects of the solution to the key business drivers motivating the solution.

There is no shortcut to developing good architecture. Understanding the components of a solution and the relationships between them enables an easier comparison of final solutions. Most solutions to the same problem will probably have similar base components. The solution differences come from the different choices made to combine elements and the physical, logical, and process differences that arise because of those choices.

The N1 Grid architecture enables a holistic revisiting of an organization's architectural activities and tips the architectural focus on using the network to organize a service-centric data center.



Buliding N1 Grid Solutions Preparing, Architecting, and Implementing Service-Centric Data Centers
Buliding N1 Grid Solutions Preparing, Architecting, and Implementing Service-Centric Data Centers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 144

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