"Tested, Tested, Tested..."
Excerpt from Strategy for Business, issue 16. - Autumn 2004
An IT infrastructure is like survival equipment. You’d prefer someone else to check it out before you trust it with your life.
A large bottle of aspirin should be added to the shopping list for those putting together an IT infrastructure. If choosing and assembling the right combination of hardware, middleware and applications hasn’t given you a headache, then the seemingly endless testing period certainly will.
It seems as if empires could rise and fall in the time spent checking and validating. Yet systems still continue to go down unexpectedly, causing frowns to appear on the foreheads of those holding the purse strings. And just when you thought the worst was over, in comes a host of requests for new functionality and the process starts all over again – often at even greater expense. By this time the frowns have become permanent worry lines.
It’s a vicious cycle and frankly, businesses have had enough. They’re looking for IT solutions that can be installed quickly and simply, that are more reliable, and can be adapted easily to handle new demands. In short, they want infrastructures with agility, continuity and efficiency. And by the way, they expect all this at lower cost than before.
TRIOLE: IT as a commodity
In seeking to break this cycle, Fujitsu’s engineers noticed that many customers were asking for similar solutions – yet each one had to endure the pain of creating their own infrastructure. So they hit on the idea of producing a prefabricated architecture that could be replicated again and again.
By taking business needs such as internet hosting, billing, ordering, credit checking and so on, they produced a series of ‘building blocks’, each containing the servers, storage, networking, middleware and applications to support a specific function. Then they tested…and tested…and tested…in their own laboratories. In fact, for a typical building block Fujitsu spends five man months designing, ten man months building and thirty man months testing.
The result for customers: 30% faster installation, 30% greater reliability and up to 50% lower costs.
Reducing complexity
A TRIOLE solution will typically comprise of three to four building blocks. The various elements – servers, middleware, storage, networking and applications – will be produced by Fujitsu and chosen partners, and the customer also gets a set of highly detailed directions on how to put it all together.
It’s a bit like buying flat-pack furniture, except the instructions are much clearer and there are no screws missing! These blueprints, known as templates, represent all the learning from Fujitsu’s rigorous testing and dramatically reduce assembly times, whilst taking away much of the risk and uncertainty.
Adapt or die
Today’s IT systems are often criticised for their lack of flexibility. Seemingly minor changes to functionality require large-scale testing. And every time new elements are introduced there’s great uncertainty over how they will fit in with the existing architecture.
TRIOLE solutions, on the other hand, are specifically designed to adapt to changes in demand and to embrace technological advances.
The TRIOLE building blocks have a life cycle of around two years, and because we’re continuously testing newer, more advanced solutions, you’ll be able to replace them one at a time, so when you add a new block, you’ll know it’s been fully validated and will deliver as promised. And you won’t have to go through the painful, costly and time-consuming task of scrapping your entire infrastructure and rebuilding – you simply enhance your existing system with the appropriate new blocks.
Total commitment
This ‘industrialisation’ of IT infrastructure has so far proved highly successful. In Japan, over 40% of Fujitsu solutions are TRIOLE-based. And as our approach develops, more advanced concepts will be incorporated.
Automation will give systems self-monitoring and self-healing properties, requiring less manual intervention, reducing downtime and increasing efficiency.
Virtualisation will allow multiple software applications to run off common pieces of hardware, so if one server breaks down, you can easily switch to another. This process – which is invisible to the user – lets you operate with fewer servers, bringing down costs whilst also increasing reliability.
Transforming the business
It’s a particular irony that whilst IT has the potential to truly transform a business; it’s also proving to be one of the major obstacles to rapid change.
Up to now, reliable systems have tended to be very expensive and less flexible, whilst flexible ones have typically been less robust.
In achieving the Holy Trinity of agility, continuity and efficiency – thanks in large part to Fujitsu’s healthy obsession with pre-testing – TRIOLE is at last giving CIOs the infrastructures they want, and laying the foundations for long-term competitive advantage.
