Patterns for IT Infrastructure Design

The design of large IT infrastructures is a complex problem because is dependent on many variables and must evolve rapidly to cope with business changes. The use of IT infrastructure patterns can improve this design process by allowing to reuse proven solutions to recurrent problems and by facilitating communication among IT design stakeholders. However, known IT infrastructure patterns are mostly like vendor-specific blueprints. As such, they are not very helpful in comparing alternatives and supporting independent design decisions. In this paper we introduce patterns in the domain of IT infrastructures covering aspects from its rationale to instantiation. This is the first step in the creation of a pattern language that will hopefully leverage the IT infrastructure design process.