Requirements

During the requirements phase, the business and technical requirements placed on the infrastructure platform are established, together with functional, non-functional and technical requirements. Conceptual architecture is also established. The architecture is influenced by the customer’s requirements, e.g. it may not be possible to combine flows that require extremely rapid response times on the same servers that run large batch jobs.

Design

During the design phase, system topology and security are determined on the basis of the customer’s current specification of requirements. Future requirements are also taken into consideration in relation to anticipated loads, etc., by making the design scalable. Scalability may involve mechanisms for load balancing, clustering, failover, mirrored disks, and optimisation and tuning.

Installation and testing

Installation normally takes place in three environments: development, quality assurance and production. These environments are tested during the testing phase. Test cases are written, tests are carried out and results are monitored. Any errors are corrected and the installation is tuned.
The environments are documented. An “Environment setup guide”, a “Configuration management guide” and an “Operations guide” are normally produced.