1.3 Conclusion

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Business requirements have evolved over the years and have started requiring more tangible factors in enterprise systems. Prior to the Internet boom, this level of requirements was not necessary for the client server application. This is evident through the following:

• Security was considered, but only to the walls of the organization.

• Scalability was considered, but only to the number of users inside the enterprise that would access the system.

• Availability was considered, but only on a smaller scale because downtime only meant affecting and informing the users in the organization.

The Internet has changed every requirement such that each requirement implemented has a matrix and SLA associated with it.

In this chapter we discussed the various modern business requirements, like reliability, availability, scalability, and recoverability, to name a few. The requirements play a very important part in modern businesses where users' dependency on computer systems after the Internet boom has been overwhelming. To keep with this increased demand the main challenge that the various organizations are facing today is to provide for scalability and availability. To meet these basic requirements, all other requirements listed in this chapter play an important part, either directly or indirectly influencing the organization's business direction.

Applications developed to provide the business functions of the organization depend on the underlying layered product technology. It is important that if these underlying layered products do not meet these requirements, this would influence the application and, in turn, the business as a whole.

While analyzing the various requirements we also looked at whether the layered products such as Oracle satisfy these features.

In the next chapter, various hardware architectures, such as SMP, MPP, NUMA, etc., are discussed at length. Also explored is the usage of clustered SMP architecture as a prudent solution for businesses with data processing needs. This architecture allows businesses to provide data storage and retrieval to users and to support increased growth of users through linear scalability. When many systems are joined together to work as a cohesive unit, they support not only the scalability factor but also the availability factor, provided an appropriate clustered operating system is used. When one system or node in the cluster fails, the users have other nodes that could be used to route their request to get to the required information. Consequently, clustering provides linear scalability, which means that more nodes or systems could be added into the mix without much difficulty. More availability is provided due to the fact that when one node in the cluster fails, the failure of one node in the cluster does not down the system, as the other nodes are available to process the required information.

The options and features around other hardware layers such as the storage subsystem, cluster interconnect, and the storage devices will also be discussed in detail.

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