The path forward: Weathering the perfect storm

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

The last several newsletters created a picture of a perfect storm in which IT organizations deploy a series of initiatives, each of which is beneficial, but ends up with a situation where applications essentially cease to function. This newsletter will discuss steps that IT organizations can take to minimize the impact of this perfect storm.

To summarize the perfect storm, in the near future IT organizations will be able to go to senior management and talk about the cost reductions and added business agility that came as a result of implementing virtualization and moving to new application architectures such as SOA and Web 2.0. However, as a result of having deployed these initiatives one of the company’s key applications could be either unavailable or running so poorly that is was unusable for hours at a time, and the IT organization is not likely to know the source of the problem or be in a situation to resolve the issue.

As we noted repeatedly in this series of newsletters, the issue is not that vendors are not developing management products to solve at least some of the problems we have been discussing. They are. One of the issues that concern us is that the sheer number of components in the end-to-end data flow is increasing dramatically. 

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The last several newsletters created a picture of a perfect storm in which IT organizations deploy a series of initiatives, each of which is beneficial, but ends up with a situation where applications essentially cease to function. This newsletter will discuss steps that IT organizations can take to minimize the impact of this perfect storm.

To summarize the perfect storm, in the near future IT organizations will be able to go to senior management and talk about the cost reductions and added business agility that came as a result of implementing virtualization and moving to new application architectures such as SOA and Web 2.0. However, as a result of having deployed these initiatives one of the company’s key applications could be either unavailable or running so poorly that is was unusable for hours at a time, and the IT organization is not likely to know the source of the problem or be in a situation to resolve the issue.

As we noted repeatedly in this series of newsletters, the issue is not that vendors are not developing management products to solve at least some of the problems we have been discussing. They are. One of the issues that concern us is that the sheer number of components in the end-to-end data flow is increasing dramatically. 

In addition, the number of components that have variable performance is also increasing dramatically. Hence, even if there were a great tool to manage each of these components and IT had the resources to acquire all of these tools, there would still be a huge burden on the IT organization to stitch all of this management information together into a coherent view of application performance. In addition, in the case of some Web-services based applications and most Web 2.0 applications, the application is comprised of some components over which the IT organization has neither visibility nor control.

Given all that we have been discussing, we do not feel that it is hyperbole to say that in the very near term, ensuring successful application delivery will be an order of magnitude more difficult than it is today. However, success is possible. We believe that it is time to develop an end-to-end architecture for how all of the various pieces will fit together. This architecture, of course, has to be closely linked to what the business is attempting to accomplish.

From an infrastructure perspective creating this architecture involves having discussions with your key suppliers about where they are heading and how they see their component of the infrastructure interacting with the other components of the infrastructure. It also requires that the infrastructure organization develop closer relationships with the application development organization in order to better anticipate the demands that applications will make on the infrastructure. 

Finally, it means working with the key management vendors to develop a management architecture. One of the key aspects of the architecture is identifying at a granular level the functionality that needs to exist in both the applications and the infrastructure. An equally important aspect of that architecture is identifying how all of that functionality gets integrated into a system that IT organizations can use to avoid drowning in the perfect storm of technological innovation that is brewing all around us. (Compare Web Site Application and Performance Management products)

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Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.