July 09, 2007
Introduction
In recent years, IT systems
have suffered from an uncontrolled growth of both infrastructure and
application software. Many datacenters that struggled to react to
business changes have developed short-term solutions resulting in
collections of superfluous software (repeated code) and superfluous
hardware (resources not used efficiently). Furthermore, these
short-term solutions make it more difficult to adapt to future
modifications. In response to the need for new models capable of
responding effectively to the rapidly changing needs of business, IT
vendors have offered service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise
grid as different solutions that will:
The
fact that the two solutions share the same objectives makes them more
likely to enable complementary solutions. Due to the tremendous
evolution in SOA infrastructure (BPEL process managers, Web services
security and business process analytics) and the adoption of enterprise
grid in datacenters, the collaboration between these two solutions has
become increasingly beneficial. This article explains how SOA and grid
collaborate and empower each other to optimize IT systems.
SOA: The Cure for Superfluous Software
SOA
is a software architecture that enables business agility through use of
loosely coupled services. It provides a component-based model that
enables modular services assembled to build composite applications.
These services are reusable business functions that are discovered and
invoked using open standard protocols across networks. This approach
lowers development and maintenance costs and makes it easy to add new
modules or logic to reflect new business process changes.
Enterprise Grid: The Cure for Superfluous Hardware
Regardless
of the software model, businesses are constantly increasing their
demands for the quality of service (QoS) provided by their IT
infrastructure. In current globalized markets, both competitors and
growing customer bases force IT systems to quickly react to
unpredictable workloads and to provide 24/7 availability. Only an
infrastructure that reuses its resources efficiently and intelligently
can fulfill these needs without incurring tremendously high costs. In
an enterprise grid, all resources in the dat center, including servers,
storage and network, work together in pools and are allocated
dynamically to each application or service based on policies (such as
workload-based pool allocation) that reflect the business requirements.
This model provides better management and resource utilization in a
datacenter.
SOA Empowers Grid
SOA
enables applications that are agnostic to systems’ language, platform
and resources. It relies heavily on standards that simplify code reuse
and deployment. As IT systems consolidate on common services
architecture, it becomes easier to run those services from a pool of
resources because those services:
Additionally,
SOA improves software mobility, so it is better suited for dynamic
environments such as grid infrastructure. Therefore, as more
applications use an SOA in the datacenter, the grid’s capabilities
become more valuable.
Grid Enables SOA
In
a typical SOA system, multiple components cooperate and interact to
provide a higher-level functionality. An outage in a single component
or a service can affect multiple applications. In addition, a slow
service that has multiple subscriber applications will affect all of
them. Hence, a single service can have huge impact on variety of
consumers if the underlying infrastructure does not react and correct
the system issue. One of the major benefits of SOA is easy reuse of
services. Services announce themselves to consumers without knowing
what the number of invokers will be. It is difficult to predict how
many service consumers will exist in the future, so scalability is
critical.
With flexibility, scalability and availability in
mind, it becomes obvious that SOA is the type of architecture that can
benefit most from a grid IT infrastructure.
SOA and Grid: Birth of an Autofed System
SOA
systems function best in an enterprise grid, and a grid infrastructure
increases its value when SOA-enabled applications run on it. Here is an
example of this synergy:
Company X now has an autofed system
that provides timely responses to increasing business demands in a
cost-effective manner and improves its efficiency as the cooperation
between SOA and grid grows.
Summary
SOA and grid have cooperative goals
of simplifying the development and deployment of extensible
applications on heterogeneous hardware environments. When SOA and grid
come together, they enhance each other and the advantages are obvious.
As both approaches mature, their synergy is increasing and producing
more-agile, automated, efficient and reliable applications in
distributed environments.
About Fermin Castro
Fermin
Castro is presently a product manager at Oracle Corp. His IT career
spans more than nine years with systems architecture, design and
development experience in Internet applications. He has been involved
with designing and developing J2EE applications since 1998. Fermin
holds a Master’s degree (Universidad de Valladolid, Spain) in Physics
and a bachelor’s degree (Universidad de Valladolid, Spain) in
Electronic Engineering.
About Pavana Jain
Pavana Jain has 19 years of experience in software development, technical support and product management. For the past eight years, she has led the Oracle Fusion Middleware product management team and has helped establish the product as a leader in SOA and grid. Jain has authored several articles and white papers on technology trends, product strategies and women leadership in technology. She has a Masters Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and is working toward a Ph.D in Neural Networks.
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