Architecture matters—to your company and to your staff. Today’s business critical solutions are the heartbeat of your company’s ability to deliver product and services, and its ability to adapt to changing business demands. These business critical solutions are completely dependent on the architecture upon which they run. The computing systems, the networks; and the enabling operating systems, databases, and middleware are the components which together make up the architecture.
CloudIBN is a leading Cloud Infrastructure Consulting & Deployment company since 1999, helping from startup to enterprise level across every industry providing business continuity and high availability. We have expertise in Private, Public- AWS, AZURE, Google cloud, Hybrid cloud optimizations. We help to meet your business objectives fulfilling highly robust, secure and affordable solutions.
Zen and The Art of Enterprise Architecture (Open Group Conference Newport Bea...Alan Hakimi
Presentation on using the discipline of systems thinking and complexity theory on using enterprise architecture do improve organizational capability by thinking of the Enterprise as a System. Blog on this topic is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zen/
Electric Supply Distributor deploys virtual desktops for increased mobility, productivity and business continuity. Revere Electric Supply keeps its remote workers productive with RingCube vDesk which was chosen over VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop.
CloudIBN is a leading Cloud Infrastructure Consulting & Deployment company since 1999, helping from startup to enterprise level across every industry providing business continuity and high availability. We have expertise in Private, Public- AWS, AZURE, Google cloud, Hybrid cloud optimizations. We help to meet your business objectives fulfilling highly robust, secure and affordable solutions.
Zen and The Art of Enterprise Architecture (Open Group Conference Newport Bea...Alan Hakimi
Presentation on using the discipline of systems thinking and complexity theory on using enterprise architecture do improve organizational capability by thinking of the Enterprise as a System. Blog on this topic is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zen/
Electric Supply Distributor deploys virtual desktops for increased mobility, productivity and business continuity. Revere Electric Supply keeps its remote workers productive with RingCube vDesk which was chosen over VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop.
As marketers discover that production costs are consuming too much of their digital marketing budgets, they seek solutions. Deliver, which is the global digital production agency for WPP, presents the business case for digital production offshoring.
Building For The Next Billion: What The New World Of Business Means For The N...Juniper Networks
In July 2012, Juniper Networks commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate what enterprises need from a network that can scale for the business and its future. Forrester Consulting surveyed 150 IT business decision-makers from enterprises in the US and found that firms will require a simplified architecture and an open, programmable network. If enterprises take advantage of this new type of network, they can leverage billions of data points, users, and devices to realize business benefits of larger revenue streams, increased customer loyalty, and lower operating costs.
As marketers discover that production costs are consuming too much of their digital marketing budgets, they seek solutions. Deliver, which is the global digital production agency for WPP, presents the business case for digital production offshoring.
Building For The Next Billion: What The New World Of Business Means For The N...Juniper Networks
In July 2012, Juniper Networks commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate what enterprises need from a network that can scale for the business and its future. Forrester Consulting surveyed 150 IT business decision-makers from enterprises in the US and found that firms will require a simplified architecture and an open, programmable network. If enterprises take advantage of this new type of network, they can leverage billions of data points, users, and devices to realize business benefits of larger revenue streams, increased customer loyalty, and lower operating costs.
Technology Challenges Encountered by Small & Mid-Sized Business (1).pdfSmartinfologiks
Invest in technology to build a remote and hybrid office work culture to enhance operational efficiencies in SMBs.
Market fluctuations, an increase in consumer demands, and cut-throat competition with marketing giants have been never-ending challenges for small and mid-sized businesses. The outbreak of the pandemic did wreck the backbone of Small & Mid-Sized Business and with the economy trying to recover, SMBs are likely to witness upcoming oddities.
With inflation witnessing a rise in February 2022 by 2.47 percent, it has turned out to be a major challenge for SMBs in recent quarters. Small businesses need to tighten up their seat belts to change the game by offering exceptional customer services, enhanced customer relations, and ensuring operational efficiencies.
Having backed up by appropriate technology is the only key to sustenance and plasticity for small businesses. However, 70-80% of small businesses still lack the available technology.
This piece of writing will highlight a few challenges that small businesses are likely to witness while adjusting technology in 2022 and avenues to keep pace with the same. But before this, let’s have a glance over a few benefits of how small businesses can benefit from a technology solution.
While many CIOs point to cost savings as the primary driving force of their Cloud initiatives, a growing number are seeing broader benefits that are focusing their team on delivering greater business value. Hudson CIO Mike Whitmer, and Trex CIO Kirby Miner presented a webinar on migrating to the Cloud and the ramifications on their budgets, their business and their people.
Topics include:
• Real-world Cloud ROI calculations: benchmark your potential for cost savings
• The business case for migrating to Cloud: to share outside the IT department
• How to get started with a hybrid approach: so you can see immediate benefit
• How the Cloud will impact your staff: key issues to address within your organization
thinkASG delivers business transformation solutions for world class brands. We help companies evaluate, design, build and maintain highly reliable and scalable enterprise IT platforms to meet business requirements and to foster agility and innovation.
Companies today are looking for a strong ROI of their IT investment. Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Microsoft application platform contain a rich set of business processes to help accelerate deployment of an ERP solution, delivering ROI more quickly.
A Microsoft Dynamics AX solution allows forward-thinking enterprises to thrive in today’s fast-paced, quickly changing environment.
This IBM Redpaper provides a brief overview of OpenStack and a basic familiarity of its usage with the IBM XIV Storage System Gen3. The illustration scenario that is presented uses the OpenStack Folsom release implementation IaaS with Ubuntu Linux servers and the IBM Storage Driver for OpenStack. For more information on IBM Storage Systems, visit http://ibm.co/LIg7gk.
Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn how all flash needs end to end Storage efficiency. For more information on IBM FlashSystem, visit http://ibm.co/10KodHl.
Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn about vSphere Storage API for Array Integration on the IBM Storwize family. IBM Storwize V7000 Unified combines the block storage capabilities of Storwize V7000 with file storage capabilities into a single system for greater ease of management and efficiency. For more information on IBM Storage Systems, visit http://ibm.co/LIg7gk.
Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn about IBM FlashSystem 840 and its complete product specification in this Redbook. FlashSystem 840 provides scalable performance for the most demanding enterprise class applications. IBM FlashSystem 840 accelerates response times with IBM MicroLatency to enable faster decision making. For more information on IBM FlashSystem, visit http://ibm.co/10KodHl.
Visit http://on.fb.me/LT4gdu to 'Like' the official Facebook page of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn about the IBM System x3250 M5,.The x3250 M5 offers the following energy-efficiency features to save energy, reduce operational costs, increase energy availability, and contribute to a green environment, energy-efficient planar components help lower operational costs. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210746104/IBM-System-x3250-M5
This Redbook talks about the product specification of IBM NeXtScale nx360 M4. The NeXtScale nx360 M4 server provides a dense, flexible solution with a low total cost of ownership (TCO). The half-wide, dual-socket NeXtScale nx360 M4 server is designed for data centers that require high performance but are constrained by floor space. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210745680/IBM-NeXtScale-nx360-M4
Learn about IBM System x3650 M4 HD which is a 2-socket 2U rack-optimized server. This powerful system is designed for your most important business applications and cloud
deployments. Outstanding RAS and high-efficiency design improve your business environment and help save operational costs. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Here are the product specification for IBM System x3300 M4. This product can be managed remotely.The x3300 M4 server contains IBM IMM2, which provides advanced service-processor control, monitoring, and an alerting function. The IMM2 lights LEDs to help you diagnose the problem, records the error in the event log, and alerts you to the problem. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
Visit http://on.fb.me/LT4gdu to 'Like' the official Facebook page of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn about IBM System x iDataPlex dx360 M4. IBM System x iDataPlex is an innovative data center solution that maximizes performance and optimizes energy and space efficiency. The iDataPlex solution provides customers with outstanding energy and cooling efficiency, multi-rack level manageability, complete flexibility in configuration, and minimal deployment effort. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210744055/IBM-System-x-iDataPlex-dx360-M4
This Redbook talks through the benefits and product specification of IBM System x3500 M4. The x3500 M4 offers a flexible, scalable design and simple upgrade path to 32 HDDs, with up to eight PCIe 3.0 slots and up to 768 GB of memory. A high-performance dual-socket tower server, the IBM System x3500 M4, can deliver the scalability, reliable performance, and optimized efficiency for your business-critical applications. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210742768/IBM-System-x3500-M4
Learn about system specification for IBM System x3550 M4. The x3550 M4 offers numerous features to boost performance, improve scalability, and reduce costs. Improves productivity by offering superior system performance with up to 12-core processors, up to 30 MB of L3 cache, and up to two 8 GT/s QPI interconnect links. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
Learn about IBM System x3650 M4. The x3650 M4 is an outstanding 2U two-socket business-critical server, offering improved performance and pay-as-you grow flexibility along with new features that improve server management capability. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210741926/IBM-System-x3650-M4
Learn about the product specification of IBM System x3500 M3. System x3500 M3 has an energy-efficient design which works in conjunction with the IMM to govern fan rotation based on the readings that it delivers. This saves money under normal conditions because the fans do not have to spin at high speed. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210741626/IBM-System-x3500-M3
Learn about IBM System x3400 M3. The x3400 M3 offers numerous features to boost performance and reduce costs, x3400 M3 has the ability to grow with your application requirements with these features. Powerful systems management features simplify local and remote management of the x3400 M3. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
Visit http://on.fb.me/LT4gdu to 'Like' the official Facebook page of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn about IBM System 3250 M3 which is a single-socket server that offers new levels of performance and flexibility
to help you respond quickly to changing business demands. Cost-effective and compact, it is well suited to small to mid-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210740347/IBM-System-x3250-M3
Learn about IBM System x3200 M3 and its specifications. The System x3200 M3 features easy installation and management with a rich set of options for hard disk drives and memory. The efficient design helps to save energy and provide a better work environment with less heat and noise. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210739508/IBM-System-x3200-M3
Learn about the configuration of IBM PowerVC. IBM PowerVC is built on OpenStack that controls large pools of server, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. IBM Power Virtualization Center provides security services that support a secure environment. Installation requires just 20 minutes to get a virtual machine up and running. For more information on Power Systems, visit http://ibm.co/Lx6hfc.
Visit http://on.fb.me/LT4gdu to 'Like' the official Facebook page of IBM India Smarter Computing.
Learn about Ibm POWER7 Virtualization Performance. PowerVM Lx86 is a cross-platform virtualization solution that enables the running of a wide range of x86 Linux applications on Power Systems platforms within a Linux on Power partition without modifications or recompilation of the workloads. For more information on Power Systems, visit http://ibm.co/Lx6hfc.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210734237/A-Comparison-of-PowerVM-and-Vmware-Virtualization-Performance
Learn about IBM PureFlex Sytem and VMware vCloud Enterprise Suite. The IBM PureFlex System platform has been used to meet the hardware requirements in support of this reference architecture. All the components required to support vCloud Suite (including computing, networking, storage, and management interfaces). For more information on Pure Systems, visit http://ibm.co/J7Zb1v.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210719868/IBM-pureflex-system-and-vmware-vcloud-enterprise-suite-reference-architecture
Learn how x6: The sixth generation of EXA Technology is fast, agile and Resilient for Emerging Workloads from Alex Yost. Vice President, IBM PureSystems and System x
IBM Systems and Technology Group. x6 drives cloud and big data for enterprises by achieving insight faster thereby outperforming competitors. For more information on System x, visit http://ibm.co/Q7m3iQ.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210715795/X6-The-sixth-generation-of-EXA-Technology
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...
Make Your Architecture Serve Your Company’s Needs and Your Own Career Goals
1. IBM Americas Solutions Advanced Technical Skills
January 2012
Make Your Architecture Serve Your
Company’s Needs and Your Own
Career Goals
A guide to best practices solutions for your
enterprise resource planning infrastructure
Authors:
Mike Mardis
Mike Sheets
Travis Smith
2. IBM Americas Solutions Advanced Technical Skills
Page 1
Table of Contents
Overview .......................................................................................................................................2
Problems with your operational environment................................................................................2
Best practice solutions .................................................................................................................3
1: Architecture Design...............................................................................................................3
2: Parallel Databases/Clusters ..................................................................................................5
3: Resource Virtualization ..........................................................................................................6
4: Industrial Strength .................................................................................................................7
5: Continuous Availability and Disaster Recovery.....................................................................7
6: Automation.............................................................................................................................8
7: Workload Management .........................................................................................................9
8: Security..................................................................................................................................9
9: Workload Consolidation.........................................................................................................9
Ensuring your staff stands out ....................................................................................................10
Summary.....................................................................................................................................10
About the Authors: ......................................................................................................................11
3. IBM Americas Solutions Advanced Technical Skills
Page 2
Overview
Architecture matters—to your company and to your staff. Today’s business critical solutions
are the heartbeat of your company’s ability to deliver product and services, and its ability to
adapt to changing business demands. These business critical solutions are completely
dependent on the architecture upon which they run. The computing systems, the networks;
and the enabling operating systems, databases, and middleware are the components which
together make up the architecture.
And, your IT staff is the mechanism which makes the architecture run and the people who
respond to business priorities and solve technical problems. You want those people to be the
best in the industry to ensure your business critical solutions are robust and that they enable
you to respond to the needs of your clients. Likewise, the individuals that make up your staff
want to be recognized as exceptional in what they do, and they want to contribute to the
company’s success. They do not want to be limited to commodity skills that can be easily
replaced by IT support located half a world away world.
So, architecture matters to both your company and to your staff. But, how do we know if we
have the right architecture? There are best practice solutions in the industry which
differentiate and enterprise architecture from commodity architecture.
Problems with your operational environment
Today’s datacenter is filled with hundreds or thousands, of computers and a series of
networks connecting these systems, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of devices that
your employees depend on every day. The cost of the computers in the datacenter is a small
fraction of the total cost of business operations, but the value to your company is enormous.
These systems give the company the information it needs to compete. Your architecture is a
multiplier. With the right IT architecture a company can succeed. With the wrong
architecture a company can become mired in a death spiral of cut backs, failure, and more
cut backs.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are complex. Many companies have ERP
implementations which include hundreds of computers with operating systems, databases,
and associated middleware that contribute to your business—all of which require
management, monitoring, maintenance, and upgrading. ERP solutions interface with
thousands of other systems. And, they also require management, monitoring, maintenance,
and upgrades. This results in an extremely complex ERP environment. The complexity
makes your infrastructure expensive to operate and highly susceptible to human error.
4. IBM Americas Solutions Advanced Technical Skills
Page 3
A complex environment requires the staff to work long hours for long periods of time. In
order to reduce costs, companies frequently operate in surge mode requiring people to cover
multiple positions. When not at their desk, they may often be on-call resulting in fatigue and
low morale. This may result in human error that can escalate into a costly outage. Although
they know that their skills provide them with job security, they are also aware that services
firms offer remote IT support which can endanger their position. They have little job security
and are not likely to perform well. All of these factors can contribute to costly staff turnover.
Best practice solutions
Best practices solutions are hardware and software
Best Practices Solutions
combinations which are recognized by the industry and
1. Architectural Design have proven to be reliable, cost efficient, and robust. They
2. Parallel Databases/Clusters are not what your vendor trumpets as the latest and greatest
3. Resource Virtualization
with the shiniest packaging. Those new products may
4. Industrial Strength
5. Continuous Availability and
become best practice products, but unless your company
Disaster Recovery thrives on “bleeding edge solutions,” they are probably not
6. Automation the right choice for complex enterprise solutions on which
7. Workload Management your business depends.
8. Security
9. Workload Consolidation
Likewise, best practice solutions are not often aging
products whose capabilities have been replaced by newer technologies. Best practice
solutions combine the best of old and new. They take proven winning characteristics of
earlier generations of products and incorporate them into new technologies to provide
competitive advantage.
There are nine best practice solutions which underlay successful modern day enterprise
environments. These solutions are not products that you buy. They are the practices which
are incorporated into products. Without best practices capabilities a product cannot be a best
practice product.
1: Architecture Design
Architecture design considers four issues in deciding what technologies to include:
Business issues are the requirements that must be met to be successful in a highly
competitive business environment. Technology is not purchased by a company for its own
sake, nor for the convenience of its employees. It is purchased to provide availability,
scalability, security, and flexibility required by your business. We include performance inside
availability because a system which is not performing well enough to meet business needs is
in effect not available.
5. IBM Americas Solutions Advanced Technical Skills
Page 4
Financial issues are the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a solution. TCO can make or break
the company regardless of service level objectives. It includes all costs over the lifespan of
the solution. This includes the Total Cost of Acquisition (TCA) plus other costs to operate
and upgrade the solution over its lifetime. TCO is directly related to Return on Investment
(ROI). A lower TCO results in a higher ROI. But, a key component of TCO is the cost of not
achieving the necessary Service Level Objectives (SLO). For instance, if the business requires
that all transactions be secure, and if it is discovered that those transactions are not secure,
then the company will lose money in one form or another. It will either incur higher expenses
of penalties or repair/rebuilding costs, or lost revenue from not achieving the required
security SLO.
It also important to consider the financial issues of both the project implementation phase
and the operational phase. Because these phases do not have the same requirements they
will not have the same financial issues. The costs of both phases must be included in the
financial evaluation.
Project issues are the architectural and financial issues involved in activities of the project
implementation. They involve buildup of development staff, the implementation of hardware
and software, and the operation of former solution while implementing the new. Architecture
design during this phase must consider the need for flexibility—the ability to bring up new,
and to retire old environments (development, quality assurance, training, development
sandbox) and the access needed by the project development staff. The architecture must
consider that pre-production environments are notoriously peaky. The peak workload in one
environment should not occur at the same point in time of other environments. Availability
during the project phase is important to ensure that expensive development resources like
external consultants are not idle, and that project timelines are met so that the new system is
ready to go-live on the date planned.
Operational issues include the support of all end user workload, as opposed to a few
hundred developers during the project phase. It includes workload peaks tied to business
operation not the development phase. Security becomes a business critical issue as customer
data and the protection of critical business operations become paramount. Surge capacity to
meet go-live as well as peak periods of operational demand such as end of month or end of
year processing must be considered. Continuous availability (including reliable performance)
as well as disaster recovery also becomes critically important during the operational phase.
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2: Parallel Databases/Clusters
Databases are often a critical component in an enterprise system. Without them the rest of
the system is useless. Parallel databases or clustered databases are an industry standard way
of ensuring that databases are available when you need them. There are two reasons for
implementing parallel databases.
Availability ensures that should something happen to a system upon which the database
depends, that a separate database can pick up the workload and continue supporting the
business until the failed component is again available. There are two types of outages which
affect availability:
Unplanned outages are outages resulting from a device or a software failure. These “puff of
smoke in the back of a data center” are not expected, but which must be planned for even
though they do not occur often.
Planned outages are outages that are scheduled in advance. They include preventative
maintenance, release upgrades, and operational activities which cannot be performed while
the system is running.
Scalability is the second reason for implementing a parallel database. A database must be
able to grow large enough to satisfy business requirements otherwise it is not be scalable.
There are two types of scalability:
Vertical scalability is the ability for a single database to grow. This is limited by the
maximum size of the computer it is running on, but it is also sometimes a limit of the
operating system which runs on hardware.
Horizontal scalability is the ability to add additional copies of the database and to run all
these copies as if they were a single database. It is horizontal scalability which gives parallel
databases their name. All the individual database members must operate in parallel and
appear to be a single database. Horizontal databases are extremely sophisticated because
they must be able to run while ensuring data integrity and reliable performance. It is not the
ability to run in parallel that differentiates one vendor’s parallel database from another’s, it is
what happens during an outage that is the real indicator of the value of a parallel database.
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4: Industrial Strength
Industrial strength means the IT systems have capabilities needed by intensive workload
processing systems with corresponding continuous availability, centralized and reliable
management tools, and high levels of security required. Examples of industrial strength
include:
– Large database manageability
– Parallel/Clustered databases
– Network management
– Online reorganization
– Data and index compression
– Database table management as well as tablespace management
– Partitioning by growth
– Cloning of systems for recovery, refresh, backup, and reset activities
– Enterprise backup and recovery
– Remote parallel databases (both synchronous and asynchronous)
– Ability to change operating characteristics on the fly (workload priorities, partitioning,
database schemes, etc)
5: Continuous Availability and Disaster Recovery
Continuous availability is the combination of high availability and continuous operations
High availability is the avoidance of unplanned outages. On distributed solutions this is
typically a hardware statement only. On mainframe systems this is typically a
hardware/operating system/database statement. It is common for vendors to claim some
number of “9”s of availability, such at 99.999%. This means that the systems only have
about five minutes of unplanned downtime per year. Slow or irregular performance is a form
of an unplanned outage.
Continuous operation is the avoidance of planned outages (sometimes called preventative
maintenance). Planned outages are much more common than unplanned outages. Planned
outages often make up many hours of downtime each week. Examples of planned outages
would include offline backups, table reorganization, application of hardware, operating
system, database, or application maintenance, upgrades of hardware, operating systems,
databases, or applications, etc.
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Continuous availability is what the business has in mind when they state their service level
objectives. This is the amount of time they have access to the company’s applications and
data. Continuous availability includes not only the systems upon which the applications run,
but also dependent systems without which the critical applications would not be useful.
Disaster recovery (DR) is the ability for critical workloads to failover to alternate systems
should the host systems for those applications fail. Failure could be due to something inside
the system, or it could be due to a facility failure such as power or air conditioning. Two
types of disaster recovery are usually planned for:
Synchronous DR is where a secondary data center is close enough to the primary datacenter
that data replication can be synchronous resulting in zero data loss. For these systems we
need a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of zero and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero.
Asynchronous DR is where the secondary data center is farther away than a synchronous
connection can be reliably operated. For these asynchronous configurations the RTO can be
just a few minutes, and RPO can be a few seconds.
6: Automation
Automation is the configuring of daily processes so their operation can be executed without
manual human interaction. This is more than job scheduling. Automation provides the
intelligent interaction that a process might normally expect from an administrator or an
operator. Examples of automation include alert management, interface management, systems
management, database management, and etc.
Automation is necessary for continuous availability. Without automation a human
administrator would have to configure the failover system and the failover process, as well as
to ensure the end users and scheduled batch jobs find the machine in its new location and at
its new network address.
Automation must integrate with all dependent components. It reduces manpower costs and
increases the quality of service to the end user community. Automation improves security.
Automation should be full functioned and mature. There should be published scripts
available for common components such as locking and serialization of servers and databases.
They should be fully integrated into the systems workload management prioritization
mechanism as well as the systems resource allocation mechanism.
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Automation should be dynamic—permitting immediate changes based on workload
characteristics and SLO demands. It should be automatic—capable of making frequent
adjustments to handle scheduled or planned changes. It should be able to be configured to
meet specific needs of each system—not generic. And it should require zero operator or
administrator intervention and no rebooting of the system.
7: Workload Management
Workload management should be able to prioritize work according to service level objectives
defined by the business. It should not be a relative prioritization system in which some
processes have priorities defined in relation to other priorities. Workload management
should be capable of affecting dependent systems as well, to ensure that critical business
processes are completed even when multiple systems are involved in the process.
8: Security
Security involves the protection of data and applications. It involves the protection and
auditing of systems, databases, applications, networks, and storage.
Security issues to consider include:
– EAL 5 certification
– Database trusted context with enhancing authentication
– Database roles with enhancing authorization and auditing
– Encrypting specific tables with strong encryption
– DASD/disk encryption with strong encryption
– Tape storage encryption with strong encryption
– DRDA data stream encryption between the database and the application servers
9: Workload Consolidation
Workload consolidation involves the consolidation of enterprise workloads at one of three
levels:
Consolidation of disparate systems into a common datacenter to deliver consistent
operational support and to reduce costs through economies of scale.
Consolidation of multiple workloads into a common system to make use of resource sharing
and enterprise tools such as automation and centralized management tools.
Consolidation of multiple applications with similar schemes into a single application with a
common set of data. An example of this is consolidation of multiple regional systems a single
global instance.
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Ensuring your staff stands out
Your IT staff is the key to making your IT systems serve the business needs. Implementing
enterprise solutions with the above best practices affects you and your staff in two ways:
Daily operational impact on you and your staff. This includes risk mitigation due to
improved security, reduced manual activity due to automation and reduced night time and
weekend work due to continuous availability. This leads to improved customer satisfaction
due to continuous availability and prioritized workload management, and improved IT
visibility within the corporation due to improved business responsiveness and reduced TCO
and improved ROI.
Career impact with your present company and with future companies. Implementing best
practices adds to your portfolio of skills. Having enterprise skills is a differentiator which
enables you and your staff to stand out in your peer group of professionals as someone having
both distributed as well as enterprise skills and experience. Skills learned on an enterprise
system can be transferred to other platforms which make you more valuable and increase the
job security for you and your staff.
Many IT professionals feel the threat of an remote consultant working for pennies on the
dollar. These consultants have experience in commodity operating systems and databases.
They are good for off shift system monitoring, but are not usually reliable or dependable for
critical IT activities. Differentiating your and your staff’s skills from these resources means
superior support for your company’s end users and suppliers as well as a higher morale for
your internal staff upon who you are most dependent.
Summary
Your architecture can help you address problems with your daily operational environment
and with your staff. Architecture is an enabler for modern companies—in effect a multiplier.
It can turn a small problem in to a business failure, or it can take a small initiative and turn it
into a competitive advantage. Architecture is a mechanism which differentiates run-of-the-
mill technical staff, from an enterprise skilled professional who responds confidently to
changes in business direction, and stands above the crowd struggling to find a place in the
industry. Implementing business critical solutions on enterprise architectures is the key for
both your company and for your staff.
For more information about IBM Solutions implementing best practices policies please click
on the following link: IBM Smarter Computing IT Optimization for SAP.
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About the Authors:
Mike Mardis, Mike Sheets, and Travis Smith are members of the World-Wide IBM System z®
SAP Solutions Advanced Technical Skills teams based in North America. They have over 30
years experience each in areas covering enterprise systems technology, IT architecture design,
product development, market management, and sales.
13. IBM Americas Solutions Advanced Technical Skills
Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Systems and Technology Group
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Somers, New York 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America,
01/2012
IBM, IBM logo, System z and zEnterprise are trademarks or registered trademarks of the International
Business Machines Corporation.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the
United States, other countries, or both.
Java and all Java based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its
affiliates.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
All statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice,
and represent goals and objectives only.
Performance is in Internal Throughput Rate (ITR) ratio based on measurements and projections using
standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput that any user will experience
will vary depending upon considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user’s job stream,
the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can
be given that an individual user will achieve throughput improvements equivalent to the performance ratios
stated here.
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