Is your IT System Production-Ready ?

During many years in the IT industry, I have been involved in both Software and Hardware Strategies. A key feature of my work has been to ensure the Production Suitability of Solutions - i.e.

• Is it Scalable - having been tested with 1,000 page hits, what happens when a million pages have to be served up ?
• How Stable is it ? Or does it require on-line support at 2:00 am ?
• Have the Failover Procedures been tested ?
• Have we considered Backup and Recovery in the design ?
• Has Security been designed in from the start or was it just a final thought ?
• Is it Resilient ? This system may need to be available 24 X 7. Easy to do with hardware, but what about the network, and other components ? Are the database and applications "cluster-aware" ?
• Will this solution really deliver the required Return on Investments when Production Costs are taken into account ?

New Training Course: How to deliver Production-Ready IT

Dennis Adams Associates is proposing to offer a new Training Course in the near future, devoted to the subject of Production-Readiness.

Some of the topics to be included include: What do we mean by "Production-Ready" ? - definitions. Reliability and Resiliance: how they apply to hardware, software, and other components ? Technologies to implement R&R including: Clustering, SAN, ServerFarms. Eliminating Single-points-of-failure. Security in the n-tier world. Monitoring: the forgotten essential. Capacity Planning: some basic approaches. Measuring your Production Costs: and how to reduce them. The "internal market" for IT, and improving the ROI for your application.

If you are a senior Developer, an IT Architect, or an IT Project Manager, and think you could benefit from some of the insights which we have to offer, contact us by email at: info@dennisadams.co.uk.

This Site reflects my Professional experience in Mid-Range Systems and RDBMS such as Oracle, Ingres, Sybase and MS-SQL Server. Starting with the database world, there are basic principles of reliability, resiliance, scalability etc. which can be applied throughout the "food chain" of IT - Server technology, Storage, Network connectivity, and Application delivery.

Over the last 20 years, I have been involved with both Management and Technical Consultancy, including :

1. Strategy - choice of DBMS, platform, development techniques
2. Implementation - migration issues, deriving business benefit
3. Management and Monitoring - performance tuning and capacity planning

It also reflects my personal philosophy about IT development and implementation...

• It it isn't broken, don't fix it.
• Does new technology really deliver the benefits needed ? (except to the developer's CV ? )
• Keep IT simple !

Dennis Adams