Processes / Information building block

• Organizations implement business processes

to fulfil their mission and vision. These
processes are organization specific – they are
the main differentiators between
organizations. As an example, some business
processes in an insurance company could be:
claim registration, claim payment, and create
invoice.
 Applications building block
• Client applications
• Office applications
• Business specific applications
 Client applications
• Client applications typically run on end user
devices like PCs and laptops. Examples of
client applications are web browsers, word
processors, and email clients.
 Office applications
• Office applications provide standard server
based applications most organizations use.
Examples are mail servers, portals,
collaboration tools, and instant messaging
servers. Most organizations run these office
applications more or less out of the box.
 Business specific applications
• Business specific applications are applications
that are typically highly customized or custom
built. Some examples are Customer
Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) Supervisory Control
And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, an
applications that are created for a specific
business process (like a insurance
management system).
 Application Platform building block

• Most applications need some additional

services, known as application platforms, that
enable them to work. We can identify the
following services as part of the application
platform building block:
• Front-end servers
• Application servers
• Connectivity
• Databases
 Front-end servers
• Front-end servers are typically web servers
(like Apache HTTP Server and Microsoft
Internet Information Services – IIS) that
provide end users with interactions to
applications by presenting application screens
in web browsers.
 Application servers
• Application servers act as containers running
the actual application. Examples are Java
or .Net application servers and frameworks
(like IBM WebSphere, Apache Tomcat, Red Hat
JBoss, and Windows .Net).
• Connectivity entails FTP servers, Extraction,
Transformation and Load (ETL) servers, and
Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) like Microsoft
BizTalk, the TIBCO Service Bus, IBM MQ, and
SAP NetWeaver PI.
 Databases
• Databases, also known as database
management systems (DBMSs), provide a way
to store and retrieve structured data. Examples
are Oracle RDBMS, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL
Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

• Application platforms are typically managed by

systems managers specialized in the specific
technology
 Infrastructure building block
• End User Devices are the devices used by end
users to work with applications, like PCs,
laptops, thin clients, mobile devices, and
printers.
• · Operating Systems are collections of
programs that manage a computer’s internal
workings: its memory, processors, devices,
and file system.
• Compute are the physical and virtual computers in the
datacenter, also known as servers.
• · Storage are systems that store data. They include hard
disks, tapes, Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network
Attached Storage (NAS), and Storage Area Networks (SANs).
• · Networking connects all components. This building block
includes routers, switches, firewalls, WANs (wide area
networks), LAN, dial-in, internet access, and VPNs (Virtual
Private Network), and (on the network application level)
relatively simple services like DNS, DHCP, and time services,
necessary for the infrastructure to work properly.
• Datacenters are locations that host most IT
infrastructure hardware. They include facilities
like uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs),
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning
(HVAC), computer racks, and physical security
measures.
 Non-Functional attributes
• An IT system does not only provide
functionality to users; functionality is
supported by non-functional attributes. Non-
functional attributes are the effect of the
configuration of each IT system component,
both on the infrastructure level and above.
 Introduction
• IT infrastructures provide services to applications. Some of these
infrastructure services can be well defined as a function, like
providing disk space, or routing network messages. Non-functional
attributes, on the other hand, describe the qualitative behavior of a
system, rather than specific functionalities. Some examples of non-
functional attributes are:
• · Availability
• · Scalability
• · Reliability
• · Stability
• · Testability
• · Recoverability
 AVAILABILITY CONCEPTS
• Everyone expects their infrastructure to be
available all the time. In this age of global,
always-on, always connected systems,
disturbances in availability are noticed
immediately. A 100% guaranteed availability
of an infrastructure, however, is impossible.
• In general, availability can neither be calculated, nor
guaranteed upfront. It can only be reported on
afterwards, when a system has run for some years. This
makes designing for high availability a complicated task.
Fortunately, over the years, much knowledge and
experience is gained on how to design high available
systems, using design patterns like failover, redundancy,
structured programming, avoiding Single Points of
Failures (SPOFs), and implementing sound systems
management. But first, let’s discuss how availability is
expressed in numbers.
 Availability percentages and intervals

• The availability of a system is usually

expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given
time period (usually one year or one month).
The following table shows the maximum
downtime for a particular percentage of
availability.
• Availability % Down time per year Downtime per month Down time per week
• 99.8% 17.5 hours 86.2 minutes 20.2 minutes
• 99.9% ("three nines") 8.8 hours 43.2 minutes 10.1 minutes
• 99.99% ("four nines") 52.6 minutes 4.3 minutes 1.0 minutes
• 99.999% ("five nines") 5.3 minutes 25.9 seconds 6.1 seconds

• Table 1: Availability levels

• While 99.9% uptime means 525 minutes of
downtime per year, this downtime should not
occur in one event, nor should one-minute
downtimes occur 525 times a year. It is
therefore good practice to agree on the
maximum frequency of unavailability. An
example is shown in Table 2.
• Unavailability (minutes) Number of events (per year)
• 0–5 <= 35
• 5 – 10 <= 10
• 10 – 20 <= 5
• 20 – 30 <=2
• > 30 <= 1

• Table 2: Unavailability frequency

 MTBF and MTTR
• The factors involved in calculating availability
are Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF),
which is the average time that passes between
failures, and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR),
which is the time it takes to recover from a
failure.