A Route to Standardized Operating Environments Pedro Gómez April 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Venezuela Copyright © 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, California 95054, U.S.A. All rights reserved. U.S. Government Rights - Commercial software. Government users are subject to the Sun Microsystems, Inc. standard license agreement and applicable provisions of the FAR and its supplements. Use is subject to license terms. This distribution may include materials developed by third parties. Parts of the product may be derived from Berkeley BSD systems, licensed from the University of California. UNIX is a registered trademark in the U.S. and in other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. X/Open is a registered trademark of X/Open Company, Ltd. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. 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A Route to Standardized Operating Environments 2 Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................................................................6 What Are Standardized Operating Environments?....................................................................................6 SOEs Within the Enterprise IT Architecture.............................................................................................7 Templates for Standardized Operating Environments.............................................................................11 Systems...........................................................................................................................................11 Software..........................................................................................................................................11 Storage............................................................................................................................................12 Services...........................................................................................................................................12 Creating Instances of SOEs......................................................................................................................12 Constraints and External Considerations Influencing SOE Selection.....................................................15 Impact of Systemic Qualities on SOE Components................................................................................18 Transitioning From Legacy Operating Environments to SOEs...............................................................20 Provisioning Standardized Operating Environments...............................................................................24 Factory-Built Systems (Customer Ready Systems)........................................................................24 Sun N1TM Service Provisioning System.........................................................................................25 JumpStartTM Technology ...............................................................................................................26 Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and the Governance of Stacks.........................................................................................................26 Summary..................................................................................................................................................28 References ...............................................................................................................................................28 A Route to Standardized Operating Environments 3 Index of Tables Table 1: Systemic Qualities per Tier........................................................................................................13 Table 2: Guideline Matrix for Systemic Qualities per SOE....................................................................14 Table 3: Standardized Operating Environment Matrix (Only Systems Shown)......................................18 Table 4: Component Impact Analysis Matrix..........................................................................................19 Table 5: Systemic Qualities Impact Categories.......................................................................................20 Table 6: Business Services, IT Services, and Applications per Tier.......................................................22 Table 7: Operational Baseline for Legacy Operating Environments (for Systems Only).......................23 A Route to Standardized Operating Environments 4 Index of Figures Figure 1: Standardized Operating Environments Live Inside the IT Architecture Tiers.....................8 Figure 2: Different Business Have Different Architecture Requirements...........................................9 Figure 3: Relationship Among Systemic Qualities..............................................................................9 Figure 4: IT Architecture Tiers with SOEs........................................................................................10 Figure 5: Additional Questions to Consider.......................................................................................16 Figure 6: Different SOEs Require Different Stack Elements.............................................................16 Figure 7: Three Instances of the Same SOE.......................................................................................17 Figure 8: Transitions to Standardization............................................................................................21 Figure 9: Services View: Business and IT Services, Applications, and Their Components..............22 Figure 10: Multitier Environment With Several SOEs......................................................................25 A Route to Standardized Operating Environments 5 Introduction Regardless of the complexity and variety existing in biological beings, living organisms are built from basic building blocks or fundamental units of life: cells. These small units execute functions, such as transportation and conversion, using a set of standardized structures (for example, the nucleus, cytoplasm, and organelles) that work together towards the proper functioning of the biological being to which they belong. Similarly, an enterprise IT architecture uses building blocks or operating environments to create, process, and transform information that supports the operations of the business organization. In this context, standardized operating environments (SOEs) represent a key concept in the simplification and normalization stages of data center optimization. Standardized operating environments act like the cells of a biological being by forming the building blocks of the IT architecture, by providing processing power, storage, software, and services. These operating environments are defined according to their place in the architecture's logical tiers, and they are shaped according to the systemic qualities (availability, performance, reliability, security, and so on) defined by the organization. The purpose of this article is to provide a better understanding of the following topics: ● A definition of standardized operating environments (SOEs) ● The place of SOEs within the enterprise IT architecture ● Templates for SOEs ● A practical guide for developing and transitioning to SOEs ● Provisioning alternatives ● Governance linkages What Are Standardized Operating Environments? Operating environments are computing and operational units that belong to the overall architecture of a data center. A standardized operating environment is a unit that is plugged into a tier of the IT architecture and has the responsibility of of moving transactions, executing instructions, and providing a service. A Route to Standardized Operating Environments 6 A unit is self-contained and has processing power and memory, an operating system, middleware, and business applications or services configured through the following four categories (the “Ss”): ● Systems, which consist of hardware resources (the servers, I/O, memory, computing power, and so on) ● Software, which is divided into three areas: ● Operating systems (what actually runs and controls the hardware resources) ● Infrastructure software (management and monitoring, messaging,