In a recent post I described how the Adaptivity and ADM toolsets can be used to classify enterprise applications and devise a strategy for modernization, enhancement, or application decommisioning (which I referred to as "sunset" in my last post). These application strategies can be accomplished in conjunction with modernizing the IT infrastructure as well.
In this post I’d like to step through the process of sunsetting applications using a recently-introduced compliant archive known as InfoArchive. In the diagram below we see that the bottom row of applications have been tagged by Adaptivity as “sunset” (a red circle). For now let’s assume that ADM has also been run and there are no dependencies with other applications.
What kind of platform needs to be deployed to effectively sunset the applications and move them off of the 2nd platform, mission-critical infrastructure?
In order to answer this question it is worthwhile considering why these older applications are running in a production environment in the first place. Quite often the answer is “compliance”. Many businesses live in fear of an audit and therefore continue to run legacy applications on highly-available, trusted infrastructure. My colleague Alan Hutcheson puts it this way:
Legacy applications are maintained because they contain information needed by the owner to meet data retention, reporting and audit obligations. Many systems have been superseded by newer applications and the most recent “live information” migrated to the new application. The older data is simply left in the original application and accessed when required. The application becomes “read only” as information is used only for reference.
The compliance issues that demand the applications remain operational and the information accessible are the need to satisfy data retention regulations and support audit, discovery and reporting obligations. The list below describes some of the compliance capabilities offered by InfoArchive…
- Chain of custody
- Retention management
- Legal holds
- Controlled destroys
- Etc.
Furthermore, most modern IT infrastructures contain both structured (e.g. tables) and unstructured (e.g. blobs or files) pools of capacity, and purchasing/maintaining two forms of archival capacity is not cost-effective, and can break integrity between structured and unstructured data.
Many (if not all) of these problems have been solved with last year’s introduction of InfoArchive. The diagram below highlights the archival transformation process that application data passes through when moving from the 2nd platform infrastructure onto InfoArchive.
This diagram highlights the process that an enterprise can use when decommisioning applications (and associated data) to the EMC InfoArchive storage system. Enterprise architects can run all content (structured and unstructured) through a transformational process in which all data is appropriately tagged with archival metadata. This metadata allows InfoArchive to implement all of the features mentioned above: chain of custody, retention management, legal holds, controlled destroys, defensible deletes, disposition, etc). In essence the process will extract the raw application data and then encapsulate metadata that provides the context that turns data into information.
Another significant benefit of this approach is that enterprise search can occur across ALL content ingested into InfoArchive, enabling search across different applications (something that was likely impossible or infeasible on the previous infrastructure).
The process of architecting the ingestion process is worthy of a separate blog post, because it is important to prepare properly before the ingestion process begins. The process is not only fast but it is also OAIS compliant.
This is the decommissioning process that can be undertaken after Adaptivity identifies candidates for sunsetting.
Another use case that InfoArchive can enable is Live Archiving. Consider, for example, the remaining (middle row) of applications that were labeled as “Enhance”.
Adaptivity has recommended that “enhanced” applications stay on the current IT infrastructure and undergo incremental improvements. In many cases, however, these productions applications are only accessing approximately 20% of their data. This means that up to 80% might be inactive data, which makes it a great candidate for live archiving. In the diagram below I’ve highlighted a large chunk of the 2nd platform’s underlying storage infrastructure as “yellow”, meaning that it can also be ingested into InfoArchive and experience the same level of benefit as the “sunset” data.
The beauty of this approach is that the “sunset” approach offered by InfoArchive has a direct impact on both the “Enhance” and “Modernize” strategies that come after it. If a large amount of application infrastructure and data has been moved off of the second platform and landed on a compliant, reliable, and cheaper tier of storage, this frees up the IT team to either (a) re-claim the 2nd platform storage for “enhancing” applications, or (b) accelerate the IT team’s ability to invest in newer IT architecture (e.g. the 3rd platform).
As I’ve explained above, using a sunsetting strategy like InfoArchive has already impacted the “Enhance” applications identified by Adaptivity.
I will dedicate a future post to explore additional strategies to enhance the applications that are running on existing 2nd platform infrastructure.
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow