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-oriented architecture is widely adopted by the IT Industry, a Service Oriented Infrastructure or SOI has lagged in adoption. This has now changed with the availability of SOI solutions like Application Server Grids, Database Grids, Virtualised Servers and Virtualised Storage.

A joint effort between HP, Cisco and Capgemini has resulted in the following definition for a Service Oriented Infrastructure:

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

The term SOI also has a broader usage, which includes all configurable infrastructure resources such as compute, storage, and networking hardware and software to support the running of applications. Consistent with the objectives for SOA, SOI facilitates the reuse and dynamic allocation of necessary infrastructure resources. The development of SOI solutions focuses around the service characteristics to be provided. The Service Characteristics are the basis for both the development as well as the delivery of the services. The notion of a fully managed lifecycle of the services provide a continuum that is in contrast to the event based deployment of IT Infrastructure that provided discrete silo's of IT Infrastructure for specific applications.

A SOI exposes a set of fundamental services such as mobility or security which are a part of the network environment that can deliver resource sharing, application integration, and communications and collaboration, that is ubiquitous, scalable, reliable, sustainable, maintainable and cost effective.

In April 2007 the Open Group dedicated a project on SOI within its SOA Working Group. The goals of this SOI Project are to develop more common understanding around SOI between the members of the Open Group.

[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.