Tutorials SOAService Oriented Infrastructure is a systematic means for describing Information Technology infrastructures in the terms of a service. The underlying principles of Service Oriented Infrastructure revert back to LDAP and Mainframe technologies, among others. Where Service Oriented Infrastructure manages to distinguish itself is the way in which it provides a mindset or framework for making Business benefits measurable.
Service Oriented Infrastructure tends to provide the foundation for Information Technology services. Intel initially developed the concept that had three different domains for Service Orientation; they were the Enterprise, the Infrastructure, and the application architecture.
For now, we will focus on the infrastructure part of that equation.
Vital aspects of Service Oriented Infrastructure include Virtualization and Industrialization. These components provide Information Technology Infrastructure services through a pool of resources, rather than through discrete instances.
While Service Oriented Architecture tends to be widely adopted throughout the Information Technology industry, the adoption of Service Oriented Infrastructure has been a lot slower. This is beginning to change, however, with the wide availability of such Service Oriented Infrastructure solutions as database grids, virtualized storage, application server grids, and virtualized servers.
The following definition of Service Oriented Infrastructure has emerged from a joint effort between Capgemini, HP, and Cisco: a virtualized Information Technology infrastructure that consists of components that are typically managed in an industrialized fashion and which are comprised of Service Oriented Architecture Application Support and manage to expose a catalog of services, rather than discrete instances.
The phrase Service Oriented Infrastructure has a much broader usage, however, which includes many configurable infrastructure resources, including storage, computing, and networking software and hardware that effectively support how applications are run. Service Oriented Infrastructure is consistent with all Service Oriented Architecture applications. Service Oriented Infrastructure works to facilitate the reuse and allocation of infrastructure resources.
A Service Oriented Infrastructure exposes a set of fundamental services that might include security or mobility, services that are part of a network environment that are able to deliver resource sharing, collaboration, communications, and application integration that is scalable, maintainable, ubiquitous, reliable, and also cost effective.
In April of 2007, the Open Group had a project on Service Oriented Infrastructure within its Service Oriented Architecture Working Group. The goals of the Service Oriented Infrastructure project were to develop a more complete understanding of Service Oriented Infrastructure.
Service Orientation is unique in that it provides a lot of tremendous advantages for Information Technology Infrastructure services. The primary benefits include an increase in the utilization of individual resources as well as an increase in service levels, since applications are not dependent on the availability of individual resources and can thus utilize any single resource that is available within the entire pool.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Technologies that are available in today’s market provide numerous options for the deliverance of high quality end to end Service Oriented services. Every service within such a domain may be virtualized through Schedulers. The required quantity of resources for the constitution of a service may be managed through a highly automated provisioning process that ensures high quality standards while simultaneously enforcing the consistent behavior of the Infrastructure Services. This can be applied to servers, databases, storage, directory services, and networks – for every aspect of the Information Technology infrastructure.
A three step model has been deployed by Capgemini in order to reap the full benefits of Service Oriented Infrastructure in a Business setting. They are as follows:
Next Page: Service Oriented Infrastructure Frameworks
