Approaches to sizing and scaling server hardware vary from vendor to vendor and between distributed and mainframe technology, but some general principles apply. One area of frequent disagreement in some organizations is the decision
Continue reading Infrastructure Resiliency, Server Hardware and Workload Management
While the effect the network has on solutions are usually understood in general terms, specific details are often unavailable. One reason is the difficulty of replicating production network conditions in test environments. Subtle changes in network performance that are difficult to detect can have significant
Continue reading Resilient Network Infrastructure, Part 2
The network is a critical resource to nearly every enterprise IT solution. While many network resiliency considerations are inherently part of modern networking, some of these features actually undermine
Continue reading Resilient Network Infrastructure
Joel Spolsky recently wrote an article about “The Duct Tape Programmer” in which he espouses the benefits of a pragmatic approach to creating (and thus shipping) software. … What interested me about his post … was how approaches to “shipping software” can sometimes differ in large enterprises when compared to shipping commercial software to end-users or to producing applications in small- or medium-sized
Continue reading Creating Enterprise Applications vs. Shipping Consumer Software: The Case for Simplicity
In this series of posts I’ll discuss the foundations of resilient infrastructure, including facilities, network, server hardware, workload management, monitoring, and presentation, application, messaging and database servers as well as why seemingly resilient implementations of these components can
Continue reading Elements of Resilient Infrastructure