Your server infrastructure is a valuable resource that, when exploited to its fullest, can drive significant business value throughout your organization. Unfortunately many organizations are not able extract this value because:

• The number of servers in the datacentre is constantly increasing - every new project and application that comes online seems to require a dedicated system on which to run and with these new systems come additional installation and management costs.
• Applications running on dedicated servers are not able to extract all of the performance capability they can provide.
• Additional processing or enhanced availability requirements for business critical applications are not addressed because doing so is too difficult and would require unacceptable (or unpredictable) outages.

To address these issues it is necessary to maintain a holistic view your processing infrastructure as a pool of resources to be applied to the dynamic requirements of a business process on an as-needed basis. The FlexITy approach to the design and implementation of such an infrastructure is based on three guiding principles:

• Flexibility & Adaptability - The processing infrastructure must be capable of responding to the changing needs of the business
• Reliability - The processing infrastructure must provide the business process with the appropriate level of availability to meet the business requirements.
• Transparency - Processing capability must be consistently delivered to the business no matter what the platform or physical location.