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The New Management Architecture
A shift in management architecture is challenging enterprise architects. How should they change their approach?
by Vinu Sundaresan
Posted March 15, 2004
Mortgages R Us scheduled an upgrade and launch of a new funding application for internal and partner use. The change had to happen overnight during the cutover hours allowed by its partner service-level agreements. The IT department carefully planned to make the changes across all the application's components.
But the thorough planning and long work-hours did not help during the cutover because dependencies on one networking service were not considered. In fact, the networking service was not even evaluated because no one on the deployment team had visibility into this specific set of interdependencies. The result was that the new application was unavailable after the cutover, forcing an embarrassing rollback of the new online process and a delay in the business campaign, which affected the company's planned revenue targets.
The IT department failed the company and caused a business crisis by not fully understanding the application's dependencies across the network, systems, and application infrastructure tiers. The crisis could have been prevented by a management architecture that provided the foundation to manage applications and services with the information and tools necessary for IT operations to truly understand the complex structure and dependencies inherent in a modern application.
This scenario and others, such as long and complex troubleshooting of application degradations, happen far too often in today's IT environment. Why? Simply put, existing management architectures and approaches do not provide an effective means to manage applications deployed on modern n-tier component architectures such as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and .NET.
The Changing Nature of Business Applications
To better understand the management challenges associated with component architectures, let's step back and look at the changing nature of business applications and their architectures. Just about every aspect of software applications has changed (see Figure 1). The economics and benefits of new technological innovations—from the hardware and operating systems applications run on to their function in the business—have driven this march.
Everything from cheap microprocessor power and bandwidth to innovations such as reusable software components, Internet standard communications, universal Web clients, and more powerful Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) has created a world where applications can be built, deployed, and altered in a fraction of the time it used to take, yet with far greater impact on the business. Because of this, minimizing IT slowdowns and outages has become imperative.
Managing applications to deliver the availability businesses demand is reaching a crisis stage as enterprises grapple with the thousands of interdependent moving parts that comprise their new applications. Mainframe and client/server architectures have clear relationships between servers and applications, but component architecture is multilevel, multitier, and extremely complex and difficult to understand, let alone manage.
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