Virtualization and SOA Synergies Propel Competitive Advantage

From cost management, to regulatory compliance, to shrinking product lifecycles, all businesses face common challenges. For solutions, a growing number of businesses are focused on initiatives that involve a line of business (LoB) and IT in the launch of high quality, value-added services designed to attract and retain customers. To build and deliver applications that support these initiatives, the critical IT methodology of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is essential. Just as essential for the optimal implementation of an SOA is the implementation of a dynamic virtualized infrastructure.

"From cost management, to regulatory compliance, to shrinking product lifecycles, all businesses face common challenges."

Successful implementation of any business service initiative rests in a strategy that aligns all vital business resources without allowing key factors for quality service delivery to be isolated in technology silos. All stakeholders of the initiative must understand the issues impacting availability, quality, and security of the service within a full end-to-end context. For that to happen, IT must establish a flexible infrastructure capable of supporting dynamic operations that meet service level agreements and business performance needs. Such an environment can best be obtained through virtualization at both the physical infrastructure layer to improve resource utilization and at the workload layer to improve infrastructure flexibility and responsiveness.

Workload and Information Virtualization Accelerates SOA
A Service Oriented Architecture is a sophisticated software application environment driven from a business process perspective. An SOA presents a coherent view of a business process as a set of coordinated services, which are created by loosely coupling modules. Unlike traditional integration scenarios, an intermediary service registry orchestrates the connections between consumer and provider modules in an SOA. Moreover, an SOA promotes software reuse at the macro or service level, rather than at the micro or function level as is typical of object-oriented programming. Within an SOA, IT can jump-start the building of new applications by simply recombining existing services in innovative ways.

That makes SOA services very dynamic. Services can move around the network as loosely coupled modules recombine. An IT infrastructure that is tightly coupled and function-oriented will do little if anything to enhance an SOA environment. On the other hand, introducing virtualization at the workload layer via grid computing middleware can break down infrastructure silos while virtualizing resources into asset pools. Grids create a flexible, dynamic infrastructure and vitalize a workload by spreading it across multiple servers in a way that facilitates the end-to-end understanding of business processes.

Nonetheless, poorly deploying data puts at risk all the value gained from intelligently scheduling and managing workloads. Since applications can be provisioned onto different nodes at any given time, data must remain readily accessible independently from where it physically resides. For an infrastructure to be dynamic and flexible, the transfer of data to computing locations must not create network bandwidth problems.

This issue can be simplified by aggregating all block storage associated with multiple disk storage controllers into a single resource pool that is managed from a central point. By virtualizing all storage into a single unified pool, administrators are able to optimize resource utilization, leverage performance-tiered storage, and centrally manage key replication services, such as point-in-time copies and global mirrors, across a unified virtual storage resource. This capability can be readily introduced into an existing fabric with a virtualization appliance like the IBM SAN Volume Controller/systems/storage/software/virtualization/svc/index.html.

SOA and the Virtual Enterprise
The network and loose coupling characteristics of an SOA combined with the coherent infrastructure management provided by a virtualized infrastructure provides essential support needed for a critical brand-building effort taking place at a number of enterprises: the extended value chain or “virtual enterprise.” With product life cycles shortening and demand becoming more unpredictable, the mandate from the corner office is to embark on an asset-light corporate strategy. Such strategies pivot around supply-chain collaboration and outsourced manufacturing, which can even transfer responsibility for the development of new products.

"The synergies derived by implementing an SOA in a virtualized infrastructure environment are profound for the support of service-oriented business initiatives."

That responsiveness can be put at risk by miscues and missteps between partners. This puts a priority on enhancing the visibility of manufacturing execution among all involved and the onus on IT to build and integrate business-process applications that reach beyond the enterprise to include partners, suppliers, and customers. From the perspective of user security and data access alone, such an extended environment introduces a plethora of operational issues for IT. Without high-level virtualization, managing an extended enterprise environment is nearly impossible.

Time to Market Payback
To meet the challenge of these service initiatives, the overwhelming need for LoB executives is to get to market quickly. For IT, this puts pressure on assembling the resources needed to respond to new business opportunities promptly and puts innovation in compressing the application development process on a par with new technology innovation for these initiatives.

An SOA provides the necessary application environment to create and run business process applications; however, a dynamic SOA environment will stress an IT infrastructure. Virtualization of physical resources—storage, server, and network—and workloads via grid computing is the best, and arguably the only, way to relieve that stress. The synergies derived by implementing an SOA in a virtualized infrastructure environment are profound for the support of service-oriented business initiatives. Through process or application acceleration, improved access to information, and system scalability, the intersection of SOA and virtualization technologies sets the stage for improving time to market and enhancing service quality.

For the Line of Business VP trying to build product lines around service offerings, there is a full end-to-end context for quality of service. This strengthens the ability to grow revenues and manage assets. For the CEO, profit margins are improved and enhanced by a higher return on corporate assets (ROA). For the CIO, there is an IT flexibility and responsiveness that garners crucial corporate credibility. More importantly, successful project implementation builds trust among all business initiative stakeholders to fuel cooperation and extend innovation.