Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Patterns Expertise
Patterns Expertise
Patterns Expertise
y = 111.12 mm
size = 102.5%
Understanding Patterns of Expertise:
Virtual Application Patterns
How IBM PureSystems virtual application patterns can speed deployment,
simplify management, reduce risk and increase agility
Understanding Patterns of Expertise: Virtual Application Patterns 2
Abstract
Enterprise IT departments strive to contribute to the
competitiveness of the business organization, developing and
deploying innovative applications that can help benet the
bottom line and drive top-line growth. Too often, however,
IT managers nd themselves unable to develop and deploy
applications with the agility they would like. The skills needed
to quickly design, test, congure and integrate applications
into complex IT environments can be difcult to nd, and
expert IT staf can quickly become overwhelmed by demand.
Virtualization technology has helped drive efciency
improvements through consolidation of workloads and to a
lesser extent through the management of systems and workloads.
Now virtual application patterns from IBM take these capabilities
a signicant step further. This paper shows how IT organizations
can use patterns of expertise provided by virtual application
patterns to speed deployments, reduce the risk of error, and
help simplify and automate tasks across the management and
maintenance lifecycle.
Introduction
In current enterprise environments, many corporate IT projects
are delivered behind schedule. A Forrester Consulting study
found that 34 percent of new IT projects in the US deploy late
and 25 percent deploy over budget.
1
These factors can severely
limit the business agility that is needed for organizations to
be truly competitive. Even in virtual environmentswhere
application deployment does not have to wait for a physical
server to be ordered and installedmany organizations
have difculty developing, deploying and conguring
multicomponent and multitier applications quickly.
When developing large and complex applications using an
enterprise-class infrastructure, great discipline and care are
essential. IT must be able to set up multitier environments
based on best practices and ensure that these topologies are the
same across development, test and production environments.
Otherwise, an application component that worked in a
developers test environment may not work well on the
integration test server or in production.
Finding and acquiring the right IT skills
Success in application development and deployment requires
strong architecture, detailed design, careful planning and
quality stafng. Many enterprises have a hard time acquiring
the right in-house skills for development and deployment tasks.
Organizations that already have these skills on hand may nd
that they are in such high demand that they become the
bottleneck in the application deployment process.
Implementing an application often requires designing for
multiple server tiers, failover capability and scaling of
applications based on demandwithout over-provisioning
expensive resources. Accomplishing these tasks in an enterprise
environment requires skilled individuals, including:
Failover: Failed virtual machines (VMs) are replaced with new virtual
machines, which are configured with the same patterns and identity
as the VM replaced