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Architecting for Service
Without a doubt, the IT environment at most companies has become highly complex and interdependent over the past few years. While consolidation, virtualization and shared farms have reduced hardware total costs, they have created interdependent platforms of components that can be strung together to run highly critical or minimally critical applications.
Unfortunately, in the effort to drive operating savings through consolidations, often times environments have been created that do not support the level of risk tolerance that the business is willing to accept. This whole problem has been created by IT and business’ lack of common understanding of service levels and architecting and maintaining systems adherence to those service levels.
To completely understand the problem, it is important to understand what a service level agreement is and some related terms. These definitions are from wikipedia and provide a good synopsis. An SLA is a formal negotiated agreement between two parties. It may specify the levels of availability, serviceability, performance, operation or other attributes of the service.
As you can see, a service level agreement is a holistic agreement about the expectation around a particular end-user service. Similarly, an operating level agreement defines the interdependent relationships among the internal support groups working…
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Half this game is ninety percent mental. - Yogi Berra |