Executive Summary
Enterprises today look to software applications not just to make existing processes more efficient, but also to power new insights and capabilities for driving business agility and competitive advantage. These strategic applications are frequently CPU- and/or data-intensive, and are also time-critical in nature.
The combination of CPU/data-intensive and time-critical requires that the applications exhibit both scalability and dependability, a tall order that many traditional approaches fail to successfully or cost-effectively meet. In addition, agile enterprises also require that their strategic applications keep pace with the change of business.
A new type of software-based application environment – the application fabric – is successfully and cost-effectively meeting the requirements of today's most demanding applications. By delivering high-levels of scalability and reliability across a virtualized "fabric" of commodity-class computers, application fabrics are eliminating the onceaccepted trade-offs among application scalability, dependability, manageability and affordability.
This fabric-based approach to application deployment and management represents the next-generation of grid computing, enabling applications that allow companies to accelerate and improve decision-making, provide better value and service to consumers, and operate more efficiently, with the overall result of getting ahead – and staying ahead – of the competition.
Application fabrics are in use today by some of the savviest enterprises in the world, who understand that technology-related advantages can enable powerful business agility. A great example of a company that is reaping the benefits of its technology advantages is Google. Google is a company known for many things, not the least of which is its ability to keep up with the dramatic growth of its core search engine business while also developing and launching new services. The agility of Google's business is powered by what can be characterized as an application fabric that Google developed in-house to support its CPU-intensive, time-critical core applications.
With its 200 computer science PhDs and 600+ additional computer scientists, Google can afford to develop and maintain its own custom application fabric. For most other organizations, the right approach is to rely on commercially available and supported application fabric software, which delivers what Google built for itself – a grid that can reliably deliver results in real-time.
The purpose of this white paper is to provide an overview of application fabrics and the business and technology advantages gained in their use.
Competitive Advantage Built On "Real-Time" Insights
Few enterprises today need to manage computing applications as vast as the Google search engine. Yet many enterprises can, and do, benefit from strategically deployed applications designed to create competitive advantage by providing unique insight into their businesses.
Often these new insights are provided by CPU- and/or data-intensive applications custom-developed to meet the highly differentiated needs of the business. While some of these applications are not time-constrained—producing results as the power and dependability of the computing infrastructure allow—the most valuable of them are time critical in nature. Managers of the business depend on these strategic applications to provide them with timely operational decision support. Encompassing applications in established categories such as business analytics, high performance computing, and data-processing, time-critical applications abound in a wide variety of industries:
- routing and scheduling in transportation and distribution
- inventory optimization and demand forecasting in retail
- price and production optimization, configuration, and supply chain management in manufacturing and packaged goods
- SIGINT analysis, threat detection and scenario analysis in intelligence and homeland security
- risk management, fraud detection and pricing in financial services and telecom
Many organizations seek to deploy these capabilities not as stand-alone applications, but as services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment. In a SOA environment, business logic is not rigidly associated with a single application, but rather is made available as Web services to be accessed and assembled into a variety of composite applications, for a variety of audiences.
Application fabrics represent a new era for time-critical applications, whether deployed stand-alone or as Web services within an SOA environment. Application fabrics free organizations to innovate new operational capabilities and insights without concern for compute-power constraints and related reliability issues.
Requirements of Time-Critical Applications
Time-critical applications present a set of demanding requirements to the businesses that need them and the technology organizations responsible for realizing them:
Deployability. Enterprises must be able to easily and quickly bring these applications "to market," and deploy enhancements over time to keep up with an ever-changing business environment.
