Service Oriented Infrastructure

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Service Oriented Infrastructure or SOI [pronounced "sō-i" or "es-ō-i"]) is a system for describing IT infrastructure as a service. The underlying principles go back to, among others, Mainframe and LDAP technologies, but SOI provides a framework or mindset making business benefits measurable.

A Service Oriented Infrastructure provides the foundation for IT services. A concept initially developed by Intel discussed three domains for Service Orientation: the Enterprise, the (Application) Architecture and the Infrastructure. This specific item covers the Infrastructure. Key aspects of Service Oriented Infrastructure are Industrialisation and Virtualisation, providing IT Infrastructure services via a pool of resources (web servers, application servers, database servers, servers, storage instances) instead of through discrete instances.

While service-orientated architecture is widely adopted by the IT Industry, Service Oriented Infrastructure or SOI is lagging in adoption. With the availability of SOI Solutions like Application Server Grids, Database Grids and Virtualised Servers and Virtualised Storage this has changed. A joint effort between HP, Cisco and Capgemini has resulted in the following definition for Service Oriented Infrastructure:

a Virtualised IT Infrastructure comprised of Components that are managed in an Industrialised way and:
- which exposes a catalog of services instead of discrete instances
- which can comprise of SOA Application Support

[edit] Orchestrating virtualized components

Service Orientation provides significant advantages for IT Infrastructure services. The main benefits are increased utilisation of individual resources (meaning lower Total cost of ownership) and increased service levels as applications do not depend on the availability of any individual resource, but may use any one resource available in the pool.

The IT Infrastructure Technologies available today provide a full stack of options to deliver an end-to-end Service-Oriented service. Each service within this domain can be virtualized via Schedulers and the required number of resources constituting a service can be managed via a highly automated provisioning process, ensuring standard quality and consistent behaviour of the Infrastructure Services. This applies to Servers, Storage, Networks, Directory Services, Databases: in fact for every component of the IT Infrastructure.