Agile IT

Thursday, 29 March 2007 00:00 Written by Candice Jones
ITWeb-Oracle`s Business Continuity Forum meets agile infrastructure DELEGATES TO the ITWeb-Oracle Business Continuity Forum, held at the Sandton convention centre earlier this month, got a taste of how businesses can benefit from agile IT infrastructure. The forum featured a business session as well as a hands-on technical session where delegates got the opportunity to personally implement the solutions.

Barb Lundhild, Oracle Group`s principle product manager, was flown out from the US to discuss ways in which companies could create more resilient infrastructures, using Oracle`s enterprise grid architecture as a basis.

"In the past, whenever a new application was needed, a new server was added which often left network resources underutilised," she said. "Servers have peaks and valleys when it comes to workload. With grid architecture, workloads can be shared across servers, which utilises resources more efficiently." Lundhild said: "One of the key aspects of resilience in network architecture is virtualisation."

Danny , business development director at Fujitsu-Siemens, added: "Companies need to move away from a server-centric to a service-centric data warehouse system." De Beer focused on how virtualisation can reduce the complexity of networks, as well as reduce overall costs. "Networks used to be 70% witchcraft and 30% craft, but networks are now becoming more agile," he said.

ABSA: VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE CHALLENGES

is in the process of creating a new data warehouse. Marlene Raats, data warehouse manager at Absa, discussed some of the challenges of implementing the new system from scratch. Through the creation of a new data warehouse, Absa ended up with two warehouses that needed to be maintained. Raats said that if they had had a metadata repository they could easily have switched from the one to the other, but now they need to catch up. Another problem was finding the skills necessary for the project. Eventually, a group of workers were hired from India.

"Challenges that are `invisible`, or not immediately obvious, can sink the boat," she noted. She added that in order for a successful migration to work, governance is essential. "Rules and standards must be in place before you begin, otherwise it becomes chaos," she said.

Another of the invisible challenges was time management. "Companies must allow enough time for things like code optimisation or fine tuning, for users to become accustomed to the new system and accept it, and for configuration and management," Raats said.

Tags: Oracle