IT INFRASTRUCTURE

IT Infrastructure



IT Infrastructure

Introduction

A fictitious mail-order bookseller specializing in titles from Microsoft® Press has decided to expand its business reach by launching a Web site, Online Bookstore. Because the company has an established order-processing system with large investments in mid-range and mainframe systems, it has decided to create a Web-commerce solution that will leverage these existing systems. The key motivation for the project is to get a presence on the Web as soon as possible, because sales have declined following the advent of other online booksellers (Weber, 2006, pp. 12).

This is the first endeavor of its kind for this company; therefore, project goals include keeping overall lifetime project costs low by utilizing existing infrastructure when possible and providing a low-cost-to-support solution. Performance is important but secondary to supportability costs and a short-term rollout schedule. If successful, the company will revisit the design to identify areas for improvement.

As a result of mergers and acquisitions, the company's enterprise data resides in a variety of data stores. For instance, customer information is kept in an Oracle 8 database running on a Sun SPARC/Solaris system. Order and inventory data is stored in an IBM DB2 database running on an IBM MVS system inherited from a merger with another bookseller. CICS programs on this system are used to process credit card authorizations. The company's shipping system is run from an IBM AS/400, with the shipping data stored in keyed, physical files.

7 Major Components of IT infrastructure in online book Store

The Online Bookstore sample application is designed using the Microsoft® Windows® Distributed internet Application (Windows DNA) architecture application development model. The application is implemented in three layers: a data layer, a business layer, and a presentation layer. The data layer represents the myriad of data sources distributed across the company's enterprise system. The business layer consists of several components running in one Microsoft® Transaction Server (MTS) package (Kenneth, 2011, pp.162).

AS/400

The company's shipping system is run on an IBM AS/400, with shipping data kept in keyed, physical files on the system. Each file represents one table of information. Metadata stored by the system is used to describe the data stored in each file, such as column descriptions. There are three files that are used by the Online Bookstore application: ShipCost, ShipMethod, and Tracknum.

DB2

The company's inventory and order data is kept in an IBM DB2 database that is running on an IBM MVS mainframe. Detailed ...