Flexibility is the hallmark of a service-oriented architecture, in which reusable application components can be shared across an enterprise and assembled in a loosely coupled way. In the data center, however, SOA technology's flexibility translates into unpredictability - a trait that is incompatible with traditional infrastructure technologies.

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What if a particular Web service's workload skyrockets because two, five or 10 heavily used applications suddenly start calling the service? Meeting that demand requires being able to allocate computing resources on the fly. "You better have the capacity to support that one service and have planned for that scaling from an infrastructure perspective -- hardware, software, network, bandwidth and storage," says Donna Scott, an analyst at Gartner.

Reallocating resources dynamically as an application's workload increases is easier said than done, however. "You can't just pretend that it's going to happen. There's nothing that's going to happen automatically in the back end just because an SOA service calls an SOA server," Scott says. "You have to have planned and built that infrastructure to enable it to scale up and down."

Tools that monitor conditions and make adjustments automatically -- or with minimal human intervention -- are critical. Some foundational technologies are server provisioning and configuration management, as well as run-book automation. Server virtualization, which lets one computer run multiple operating systems, also plays a role.

Technologies such as these comprise what some call a real-time enterprise (RTE). In an RTE, the run-time environment is optimized dynamically so it can be scaled and tuned to meet fluctuating demand, Scott says. "You're mapping the demand for IT services with the supply of resources," he says.

Service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) is another name for it. SOI is the basis for greater IT automation, says the Open Group, an open standards consortium working to define a reference framework and maturity model for SOI. With SOI, companies can move from dedicating infrastructure resources for each application to allocating resources dynamically using virtual processing, storage and network resources.

"SOA and SOI can exist on their own, but when you marry them, you see the big-bang achievement," says Hemesh Yadav, who is lead architect in Wachovia's retail technology architecture team and co-chair of Open Group's SOA-SOI project, established in July (see "SOA made fast and easy" for more on Wachovia's use of SOA).