End-to-End e-business Transaction Management Made Easy

Chapter 1. Transaction management imperatives 11

b. Create additional competency groups within IT operation, with the ability to

receive and analyze application-related problems in cooperation with the

development groups.

c. Improve the communication and cooperation between competency silos

within IT operations, since many problems are going to involve multiple

hardware and software platforms.

d. Establish or improve the cooperation between QA and operations to make

sure that the testing phase is a true preparation of the deployment phase,

and that many integration and performance problems are tackled

beforehand.

1.3 e-business applications: complex layers of services

A modern e-business solution is much more complex than the standard terminal

processing-oriented systems of the 1970s and 1980s, as illustrated in Figure 1-2

on page 12. However, despite major revisions, especially during the turn of the

last century, legacy systems are still the bread-and-butter of many enterprises,

and the e-business solutions in these environments are designed to front-end

these mainframe-oriented application complexes.

12 End-to-End e-business Transaction Management Made Easy

Figure 1-2 Growing infrastructure complexity

The complex infrastructure needed to facilitate e-business solutions has been

dictated mostly by requirements for standardization of client run-time

environments in order to allow any standard browser to access the e-business

sites. In addition, application run-time technologies play a major role, as they

must ensure platform independence and seamless integration to the legacy

back-end systems, either directly to the mainframe or through the server part of

the old client-server solution. Furthermore, making the applications accessible

from anywhere in the world by any person on the planet raises some security

issues (authentication, authorization, and integrity) that did not need addressing

in the old client-server systems, as all clients were well-known entities in the

internal company network.

Because of the central role that the Web and application servers play within a

business and the fact that they are supported and typically deployed across a

e-business

e-business

with Legacy Systems

Client-Server

GUI Front-End

Terminal

Processing

Internet

Enterprise Network

Central Site

Browser

Browser

Browser

Browser

Web

Server

Web

Server

Appl.

Server

Appl.

Server

Personal

Computer

"Dumb" Terminal

Personal Computer

Business Systems

Databases

Business Systems

Applications

Business Systems

Front End

Server

Chapter 1. Transaction management imperatives 13

variety of platforms throughout the enterprise, there are several major challenges

to managing the e-business infrastructure, including:

򐂰 Managing Web and application servers on multiple platforms in a consistent

manner from a central console

򐂰 Defining the e-business infrastructure from one central console

򐂰 Monitoring Web resources (sites and applications) to know when problems

have occurred or are about to occur

򐂰 Taking corrective actions when a problem is detected in a platform

independent way

򐂰 Gathering data across all e-business environments to analyze events,

messages, and metrics

The degree of complexity of e-business infrastructure system management is

directly proportional to the size of the infrastructure being managed. In its

simplest form, an e-business infrastructure is comprised of a single Web server

and its resources, but it can grow to hundreds or even thousands of Web and

application servers throughout the enterprise.

To add to the complexity, the e-business infrastructure may span many platforms

with different network protocols, hardware, operating systems, and applications.

Each platform possesses its unique and specific systems management needs

and requirements, not to mention a varying level of support for the administrative

tools and interfaces.

Every component in the e-business infrastructure is a potential show-stopper,

bottleneck or even single point of failure. Each and every one provides

specialized services needed to facilitate the e-business application system. The

term

application systems is used deliberately to enforce the point that no single

component by itself provides a total solution: the application is pieced together by

a combination of standard off-the-shelf components and home-grown

components. The standard components provide general services, such as

session control, authentication and access control, messaging, and database

access, and the home-grown components add the application logic needed to

glue all the different bits and pieces together to perform the specific functions for

that application system. On an enterprise level, chances are that many of the

home-grown components may be promoted to standard status to ensure specific

company standards or policies.

At first glance, breaking up the e-business application into many specialized

services may be regarded as counterproductive and very expensive to

implement. However, specialization enables sharing of common components

(such as Web, application, security, and database servers) between more

e-business application systems, and it is key to ensuring availability and