While the vision of IT might be rows of gleaming systems running standardised applications, the truth is that many organisations struggle with their IT environments as wave after wave of new IT projects have had to work alongside older kit and software.

The end result is felt most keenly in terms of service delivery. From the user perspective, what goes on behind the curtain should be irrelevant, but users and IT staff alike bear the brunt of such things as complexity and fragmentation within the infrastructure, which impacts such characteristics as availability and performance.

A number of proven design principles exist, such as clustering, replication and so on, which exist to help deliver an effective, reliable IT infrastructure. Meanwhile as well, infrastructure itself is changing, largely due to the impact of virtualisation but also starting to take into account hosted service delivery. Such capabilities do offer benefits from an availability and performance perspective, but they can also be a risk if they are not considered in terms of how to deliver a reliable, available infrastructure.

So where to start? In this webinar, now available on-demand, we consider how to think architecturally, taking into account service delivery and manageability aspects to ensure the availability and performance of specific applications and the infrastructure as a whole.