Deployment Design Methodology

As with other aspects of deployment planning, deployment design is as much an art as it is a science and cannot be detailed with specific procedures and processes. Factors that contribute to successful deployment design are past design experience, knowledge of systems architecture, domain knowledge, and applied creative thinking.

Deployment design typically revolves around achieving performance requirements while meeting other QoS requirements. The strategies you use must balance the trade-offs of your design decisions to optimize the solution. The methodology you use typically involves the following tasks:

• Estimating processor requirements. Deployment design often begins with estimating the number of CPUs needed for each component in the logical architecture. Start with the use cases representing the heaviest load and continue through each use case. Consider the load on all components providing support to the use cases, and modify your estimates accordingly. Also consider any previous experience you have with designing enterprise systems.

• Estimating processor requirements for secure transport. Study the use cases that require secure transport and modify CPU estimates accordingly.

• Replicating services for availability and scalability. Once you are satisfied with the processor estimates, make modifications to the design to account for QoS requirements for availability and scalability. Consider load balancing solutions that address availability and failover considerations.

  During your analysis, consider the trade-offs of your design decisions. For example, what affect does the availability and scalability strategy have on serviceability (maintenance) of the system? What are the others costs of the strategies?

• Identifying bottlenecks. As you continue with your analysis, examine the deployment design to identify any bottlenecks that cause the transmission of data to fall beneath requirements, and make adjustments.

• Optimizing resources. Review your deployment design for resource management and consider options that minimizes costs while fulfilling requirements.

• Managing risks. Revisit your business and technical analyses with respect to your design, making modifications to account for events or situations that might not have been foreseen in the earlier planning.