The New Management Architecture (Continued)

The Need For a New Approach
One CIO who leads a large business services company has been implementing component-based application technology for the past four years and has experienced a dramatic improvement in his ability to deliver business applications rapidly. But he has also seen a hundred-fold increase in the number of components required to deliver a single application.

Typical application architecture can include multiple database servers, clusters of Web servers and application servers, portal servers, client-identity servers, firewalls, load balancers, and of course tens or even hundreds of application software components such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and servlets. Quickly, he realized that the design and implementation of a management capability into his enterprise architecture was mandatory, or the delivery of reliable services would be severely jeopardized.

Traditional management architecture and approaches focus on instrumenting, measuring, and monitoring traditional FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security) metrics at the component level. However, as this CIO quickly learned, just because each infrastructure tier and each component team reports three nines or more of availability, this measurement does not tell him anything about the business application's availability to his customers. Managing consistently and reliably available applications requires a new approach that builds on traditional component management architectures, yet provides an understanding of the top-down structure of business applications and their runtime configuration, cross-tier dependencies, and operational status.

This new application-centric management approach, based on a top-down view of applications, builds on current investments, leveraging the enterprise's resources and providing a new framework on which to measure and manage the true delivery of business applications and services (see Figure 2).

Realization that IT has become an integral part of an enterprise's strategy for growth has given rise to utility computing visions from the major datacenter vendors such as IBM (on-demand computing), Sun Microsystems (N1), and Hewlett-Packard (adaptive enterprise). These initiatives primarily address the system architecture aspects, and to some degree, the management instrumentation required for self-healing infrastructures. Unfortunately, these are, to a large extent, only visions and do not yet solve problems of managing the complexity inherent in distributed component-based applications. They do not provide the critical capability of automatically creating and maintaining an accurate and up-to-date view of how today's IT infrastructure delivers business applications.