Creating a Service-Oriented Infrastructure for System z

by Steve Guendert , Brian Larsen
November 1, 2008

The concept of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is based on applying the appropriate services to applications, processors, and storage to maximize efficiency and flexibility for the IT environment. Because the term “service-oriented” has been in existence for some time, it has been used in different contexts and for different purposes. One constant throughout its existence has been that it represents a distinct approach for separating concerns. This means that the logic required to solve a large problem can be better constructed, managed, and carried out if broken down into a collection of smaller, related pieces. Each of these pieces addresses a concern or specific part of a problem.

SOA encourages individual units of logic to autonomously exist, yet not be isolated from each other. These units of logic are still required to conform to a set of principles that let them independently evolve, while still maintaining sufficient amounts of commonality and standardization.

In SOA, these units of logic are known as services, which are essentially just repeatable business-oriented tasks. The strengths of the System z platform, combined with SOA, represent a powerful solution for any business that desires the ability to move within its marketplace while retaining all the valuable attributes that define the System z platform.

Fulfilling requirements of the SOA concept requires intelligent processing, operating systems, and storage and an infrastructure that supports its objectives. This “data center fabric” should support and provide the services to both the host and storage that allow data flows to be managed as requirements change. A data center fabric that provides different and optional services is termed a “Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI)” and provides administrators the flexibility to use adaptive networking that includes Quality of Service (QoS), data mobility, encryption, and virtual connectivity for fast and reliable deployments, independent of the protocol. This article examines how users should plan for today’s infrastructure needs while building an SOI for the future.

The System z and SOA/SOI

System z data centers have been evolving for decades and have re-established themselves as core processing facilities that contain much more than just legacy business applications. For many years, the mainframe has epitomized reliability, availability, security, and scalability. These strengths are the reason why so many enterprises made the mainframe their deployment platform of choice for their mission-critical applications. The banking industry is a great example of an industry that has a strong affinity for the mainframe. However, mainframe capabilities are becoming increasingly important for all industries, resulting in the mainframe becoming increasingly prevalent in data centers for all industries.

Applications, not the network, should control access to and management of their data. Unfortunately, it becomes more difficult for applications to access their data as new protocols and virtualization techniques have been added in the data center. Enterprises actually deploy and manage many physical networks: separate server-to-storage (SANs), server-to-server (clusters), and storage-to-storage replication networks are common within and between data centers.