7.4 Application Deployment

The ability to efficiently and rapidly deploy business-critical applications can determine the difference between success and failure in many of today's markets and industries. Because many business units depend on certain applications to complete daily activities, the maintenance, upgrading, and deployment of these applications can have a significant impact on organizational operations. For many years , the storage infrastructure has been the long pole in the tent with regard to application deployment. The direct-attached nature of the storage capacity and often the internal server-based storage presented a costly and complicated data migration in order to accomplish even a simple server upgrade. However, the advent of network storage and the exponential cost reductions of the associated capacity have freed IT managers to dynamically allocate storage capacity and have created deep pools of space for incidental migrations and infrastructure upgrades.

In this section, we examine the transitioning of systems and also delve deeper into the ways companies create business value through the rapid response model of application deployments.

7.4.1 Transitioning Between Systems

As previously stated, the advent of networked storage has alleviated many constraints when transitioning systems and applications. In addition, the convergence of IP and data storage affords a greater degree of ubiquity in the access options to the storage capacity as well as easing its management.

Now that the storage infrastructure resides within the network construct, application servers need not be concerned with the physical location of the storage capacity. The servers must remain aware of the network access constraints and also the operating system rules. In order for the operating system to access the storage, volumes must be created or mapped to the system. This is a well- understood task, and most operating systems have built simplicity into the volume creation and mapping effort. Thus, the operational benefits of system transfer are easy to attain. Figure 7-8 illustrates the system transfer concept as it relates to the networked storage infrastructure.

Figure 7-8. Lack of disruption when changing the application server.

When an exchange server becomes too slow for the number of users attached to the system, IT staff can schedule the required application downtime and focus on rebuilding the application on a faster system without being overly concerned with the underlying data. The data physically resides within the network infrastructure. This significantly lowers the burden for system transfer and allows the organization to more easily adopt new technologies that increase productivity while leveraging the ease of management associated with networked storage.

With the network infrastructure in place, the location of the new application server could be internal or located at a service provider data center. The fluid nature of the infrastructure allows easy migration to a complete or partially outsourced storage infrastructure. The same techniques could be used for companies completing post merger-and-acquisition integration of systems.

One issue to consider is the complexity surrounding data protection. Whenever systems are changed or applications are moved, there is a need to reconfigure the backup and recovery software resident on the target hosts . This is not a difficult task, but must be conducted to ensure proper protection across the entire system.

7.4.2 The Rapid Response Model

The rapid response model can demonstrate an IT organization's ability to provision systems and applications on a just-in-time basis. Additionally, it provides the IT staff with the capability to deploy applications rapidly without dreadful lead times. Organizations need to invest in application, system, and people inventory to accommodate such requests . The investment need not be heavy, as the appropriate match of storage networking infrastructure with outsourced capabilities could deliver the requisite arsenal for rapid response. This is akin to the flexible production system employed by the likes of Toyota and other large-scale manufacturing operations.