Architectural Engagement Improvement Approach


Taking an architectural approach to service-centric design is another way of analyzing your set of solutions. By analyzing how much the people, processes, and tools are incorporated into the architecture, you can understand the appropriateness of the solution to your organization's needs.

Are you tired of the outages and how business units keep bringing you solutions with the following attributes?

  • Poorly formed requirements, SLRs, and use cases

  • Missing analysis on scalability or availability

  • Ill-fitting business continuity considerations

By setting architectural standards for solution proposals from the business groups, you better understand the business solution under question. You can provide a means to analyze where you are as an organization, and you can hold your organization to the same standards.

Solid architectural principles and a common architectural language provide the ability to be responsive to business drivers that mandate improved architecture and communication, for example:

  • New architectural issues presented by the need to support a new business continuity initiative

  • New regulatory requirements for longer retention of builds, or the complete architectures, of the certification environments

  • Data privacy concerns with legal or regulatory implications

  • New software developers or a new set of end users, obtained from a recent acquisition

  • Exponential growth in users, devices, data, computations, or complexity

One approach is to make the architecture assessment an analysis of the service-centric design. You should ask:

  • Does the solution use the common language of layers and tiers, completely decomposing the solution before presenting options for solution combinations that bring in their unique set of constraints and process impact?

  • Does the solution capture the service in terms of use cases and SMART service level objectives (SLOs) so that implementations of the proposed architectures can unambiguously demonstrate their compliance with the requirements?

  • Does the solution have traceable requirements, linking the tools, technology, and processes chosen to the key business drivers that motivated the solution in the first place?

Another approach is to break that enterprise architecture down into smaller pieces around which to have architectural discussions and analysis. Although the complete enterprise architecture discussion must eventually happen, this breakdown is especially effective for solutions that are being integrated into an architecture, for a set of solutions that already exist, or for a solution that focuses on one of the topics discussed in this section.

Horizontal Engagement Analysis Points

A horizontal N1 Grid software engagement usually focuses on:

  • Eliminating single points of failure (that is, multiple easily replaceable and possibly randomly sized resources combined to provide redundancy in the solution)

  • Providing near-infinite scale (that is, resources that reside in a pool behind some form of virtualization with some kind of hardware or software load balancing or service distribution mechanism)

  • Isolating protocols or services (that is, separation of protocols or services to deliver improved protection or individual scaling possibilities) by leveraging Sun's Service Delivery Network approaches.

  • Reducing costs (that is, inexpensive and replaceable compute, network, and storage resources that are often used in horizontally scaled solutions)

  • Rapid repurposing (that is, the ability to quickly modify or substitute the service that is offered on the replaceable resources in response to end user or business demands)

Vertical Engagement Analysis Points

A vertical N1 Grid software engagement usually focuses on:

  • Scalability (that is, resource intensive loads that might need to scale into larger resource usage)

  • Consolidation (that is, cost and complexity reduction from reducing the number and type of compute, network, and storage resources and the number and versions of applications and services)

  • Business continuity (that is, a focus on maintaining the capability and availability of state and information that enable a successful transfer to a new location, including the organization's people and processes)

"Ilities" Engagement Analysis Points

The "ilities" include scalability, manageability, availability, secureability, and reliability. An "ilities" N1 Grid software engagement usually focuses on:

  • Identification of the causes of service degradation or failure

  • Analysis of a particular "ility" over the tiers and layers of a service to determine strategies that address service delivery gaps

Opportunity Engagement Analysis Points

An opportunity N1 Grid software engagement usually focuses on:

  • Acquisition of or desire to leverage new software standards (either new to the company or a better standardization and utilization of the existing standards)

  • Innovative business units that are interested in collaborating to create business value with services



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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