SETLabs Briefings - Service Oriented Infrastructure

There is a palpable sense of anticipation about SOA the “new face” of enterprise computing and IT services paradigm. Lot of debate is going on the important SOA issues like application models, service granularity, interfaces, re-use economics etc. The story that is left untold is how some of the so called esoteric technologies like Grid and virtualization make true SOA realizable in practice; well, almost. There are many significant technology shifts happening in those dark non-descript gargantuan warehouses that pass by the name “data centers” hosting thousands of computing resources. Research efforts worth millions of dollars are being spent on infrastructure layer virtualization and associated technologies. If we add to this the decades of extensive research done in the area of distributed heterogeneous computing or Grid, we now have a set of technologies that can usher in service orientation in the infrastructure fabric layer. We term this technology paradigm as Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI). In this article, we discuss how the fabric layer technologies can play a vital role in realizing SOI in an enterprise. We also show how “thresholds” of service orientation can be achieved through increasing maturity of fabric technologies like virtualization and Grid.