The Best Practices article on the Dot-Com Builder web site, "STAR: Strategic Technology Architecture Roadmap," outlines how an enterprise architect can design a solution that covers all the facets of the computing environment, including applications, systems, servers, storage, and the network. Senior IT architect with Sun Professional Services Rakesh Radhakrishnan identifies a framework for the dominant reference macro architectures that plays a critical role in each of these areas and puts them into a single perspective.

The article defines STAR, a framework that encompasses and ties together the various architectures in an enterprise--network, systems, application infrastructure (such as database and directories) and functional applications--to create a true e-business. Application infrastructures are discussed, along with the way e-business enables a company to be more competitive and make better use of customer data.

Other topics covered include:

• Layering of an enterprise technology environment
• The lower/network infrastructure layer
• The upper infrastructure layer (the application and virtual infrastructure layers)
• A list of the most popular application servers compliant with JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) technology
• Relationships between STAR and generic architecture layers
• Scalability, compatibilty, availability, manageability, security, adaptability
• The virtual application layer with the distributed component architecture
• The application infrastructure layer with an N-tier architecture
• The upper infrastructure layer with the service-driven architecture
• The lower/network infrastructure layer with the network-centric architecture
• The server layer with the adaptive compute architecture
• The storage infrastructure layer with the storage network architecture

There are tables of infrastructure layers and more technical details available on the web site.

http://dcb.sun.com/practices/howtos/strategic_tech.jsp [...read more...]

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