Enterprise Application Integration & SAN.

By now, most or us nave read about, been involved with, or had direct experience with SANs (Storage Area Networks) based on the amount of market visibility given to the topic. Can we say the same about EAI (Enterprise Application Integration)? Let's take a look at these two emerging areas in order to understand their increasing value to each other.

EAI Middleware Overview

What is EAI? EAI is packaged software that provides the foundation for integrating enterprise software applications and business processes that run on different computer systems. EAI middleware solutions significantly cut the time and cost of development, integration, and maintenance of applications that exist on legacy, open systems, and distributed platforms. In the case of EAI, middleware is the software glue that helps databases and applications that run on different computer systems work together. Application integration, thus, includes any effort to enable to or more application systems to communicate and share each other's most valuable asset--their data. Analyst projections call for the EAI middleware revenue market to reach $600 million in 1999 and exceed $5 billion by year-end 2003, a CAGR of over 75%.

The EAI middleware market is being driven primarily by the following items: 1) The re-centralization of computing resources, 2) The need to access data from applications running on OS/390, Unix, NT, and Linux platforms, 3) The tremendous effort and expense to accomplish application integration through labor-intensive point-to-point programming and data migration or conversion methods, and 4) E-business, Internet, and .com paranoia. Relatively speaking, many customer environments today looking at EAI have significant investments in batch-oriented systems and modifying these systems is difficult, given the well-publicized shortage of software developers. Costs of modifying existing software applications are estimated to range from $2.50 to $4.00 per line of code!

Several trends led to developing distributed and client/server computing systems of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the attempt to break down what was perceived to be large and more costly centralized computing environments. Applications were developed in a variety of areas within a business and were seldom coordinated. As a result, islands of information were created with little thought given to the longer-term requirement to communicate and share information between the islands. The islands were often built around different computing systems with Unix, NT, and 0S/390 (then MVS) at the core.

By the mid-1990s, we knew that distributed computing and its management was often significantly more expensive, created redundancy, and was more labor intensive than managing resources centrally. This reality has fueled the present trend to centralization of computing resources with distributed access. In addition, changing applications in these systems was very difficult and costly. It is now estimated that 70% of business critical data is stored in OS/390 (the mainframe) class enterprise servers. This situation is not likely to change in the near future, given the high availability characteristics of these systems (now at 99.999% for Sysplex). The mainframes performance, stability, and scalability make it the most secure and reliable method for storing both historical or legacy data and current data files.

Enterprise or mainframe systems are now growing in number for the first time in the decade. Nonetheless, much of the tremendous IT growth is based on open systems platforms, typically NT or Unix platforms, as it is easier to develop new applications on these systems. Open systems, with their inherent support for and the standardization of TCP/IP networking, low cost, and easy implementation, are excellent choices for implementing the distributed architecture of the Internet or company Intranets. Networking between the various departments and organizations will become much easier.

By the way, XML (Extensible Markup Language) is quickly looking like the final piece of this basic network infrastructure. But what happens when data movement and shared file access becomes more intensive between the various departments within a business or between businesses (B2B) and outgrow the I/O capabilities of LAN-based data transfer? Unfortunately, the goal of real-time universal data access has, until now, been unattainable. Different implementations achieve part of the goal, but each misses in at least one critical criterion. The access is either not instantaneous or the data is not in its native mode. The system cannot directly access data wherever it resides on the network and, as a result, it must move the data from the core database and often reformat the entire file. Additionally, these solutions are expensive, proprietary, time-consuming, and resource intensive to implement.

Does the growing EAI market clearly identify an application area that SAN architecture has targeted? If one server did not need to access the information on another server, EAI wouldn't exist. Our highly integrated world of computing suggests that connecting all types of nodes on a worldwide network is no longer an option. Projections are now indicating that the number of IP addresses will match or exceed the world's population by 2005. NAS can provide a good solution in low to moderate data intensive systems. The EAI model of connecting unlike servers and their respective users to enable data access and data sharing nicely overlays the SAN model for allowing heterogeneous servers to access a common pool of storage.

The SAN may be ahead of its time, but once again is not ahead of its vision. Keep in mind that NAS can provide a good solution in low to moderate data intensive systems. The longer view for SANs significantly challenges and eventually replaces the traditional practice of using a general-purpose server and dedicated storage as a storage repository. The high-speed network fabric constructed from high speed interfaces connects a pool of data storage devices to a group of servers and allows storage devices and servers to be added and removed independently of each other, vastly improving availability over existing EAI storage structures. In the SAN, data is shared rather than connected to and owned by a server. An unscheduled outage on a server need not affect access to data in the SAN model. Emerging SAN management software and data sharing software solutions are being developed that enable and enhance the trend toward EAI. As EAI systems demand large data intensive solutions, the SAN enables the application ser vers to integrate legacy systems data, databases, and existing core applications with web applications, ERP, CRM, and the now exploding category of e-commerce and e-business applications.

As Web and e-commerce applications continue to grow in size, complexity, transaction volumes, and importance, the need for ease of management in designing, developing, and deploying them grows, as well. A recent report from Alex Brown stated that Amazon consumed 42TB in six months and Mail.com filled 28TB in 45 days! 28TB approximates the total traffic per month on the Internet three years ago. These applications don't respond to any known capacity planning methodology! The coupling of these requirements with the premise that SANs reduce the complexities and costs associated with managing storage further highlights the importance of the SAN to future EAI needs. Most of the large operating system vendors are beginning to provide an end-to-end method for integrating legacy systems with distributed platform applications and are actively partnering with key strategic middleware and data sharing providers.

ASPs, EAI, And The SAN?

Once we integrate our appropriate applications, do we need to actually run them? Looking even further ahead, a new group of service providers called ASPs (Application Service Providers) are quickly emerging. ASPs represent a new way to allow outside organizations to take responsibility for running and maintaining an application while the end user accesses the application and its data over the web or a virtual private network. The customer typically pays for the application either by user or server on a monthly basis. In this case, the end user is typically renting the application with the prospect of reducing their development and maintenance expense. ASPs bank on the belief that storage is not everyone's core competency. Clearly, there are questions here around the level of service, the quality of service, and, more importantly, security that the ASPs offer but the concept has considerable appeal, particularly if the ASPs will offer EAI services for the customer. From a data and storage perspective, the ASPs will potentially become a primary user of SANs to effectively provide this new class of service cost-effectively.

Even before we have implemented the SAN concept on a widespread basis, we can see that the new wave of application requirements and their potential providers present even more extensible uses for the SAN. With web users now predicted to exceed 400 million people in three to four years and e-commerce revenues to surpass a trillion dollars in the same timeframe, growing the storage infrastructure is even more critical than ever. The observations that led to the de-centralization of computing in the early 1990s and re-centralization just five years later must not repeat themselves. Mapping future storage directions to the rapidly changing information landscape of the 21st century presents the storage industry with its greatest challenge yet.