Editor’s Note: The Alliance again welcomes Jonathan Eunice, co-founder and principal IT advisor for Illuminata, to our blog. The complete series of four videos featuring Jonathan and Alliance president and executive director Joan Jacobs can be found here.
What do you need to run mission-critical apps? From a feature/function checklist perspective, the answers are pretty clear. They’re things like extremely high performance, rock-solid reliability, high-availability that doesn’t stop, the right application and support software, good value, and strong support.
See the latest and final video installment below, Safe & Sound
See the corresponding slide deck for “Safe & Sound” here.
But let’s look the requirements a little differently, a little more philosophically. What virtues are we looking for in our platforms for our most important applications? I like these:
Headroom – Mission-critical systems run mission-critical apps. They’re important. They take in money, or manage critical business processes. If they don’t perform well enough, everyone’s unhappy. Customers complain, and may balk. Executives become very cross. Bad things happen. In specifying a mission critical system, you want to ensure that there’s enough performance for the apps, services, and requirements that you have today—and those that are coming. If you get more customers, acquire a competitor, or have a massive promotion—whatever the eventuality, you want to be able to handle it with aplomb.
Safe and Sound – If you think customers and executives get cross when systems and applications perform poorly, just wait until those systems and applications go down. Unavailability is a profoundly bad outcome when the business is on the line.
Amidst and Among – You want whatever systems you source to work with the other systems, applications, and services you already have. The real world is heterogeneous, so it has to go along and get along. It has to integrate well—technically, culturally, and in every other way with the choices you’ve already made. Windows, Linux, Unix, whatever. This database vendor or that. This application or that. It must be a well-integrated into the world you have, and the one you’re constructing.
Big Iron is the architectural pattern that most clearly embodies these virtues for mission-critical databases, applications, and services, as well as for highly virtualized, highly consolidated infrastructures.
In a series of four video discussions, Alliance President and Executive Director Joan Jacobs and I have gone into more detail about how Itanium, an architecture born to run Big Iron systems and mission-critical apps, helps deliver these virtues.
