Architectural patterns for high availability

The IBM® Sterling Distributed Order Management (DOM) application is often deployed in an integrated network of external systems to form a cohesive business ecosystem. Prolonged application or system outages can have significant business consequences.

Decoupling and component independence is an extremely powerful architectural pattern to insulate critical portions of the overall ecosystem solution from downtime or faults in other areas. The availability and uptime of the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation-based solution can be greatly enhanced by adopting one or more of the following patterns during solution design. Each of these patterns makes it possible to decouple one or more parts of the application from other portions thus providing increased availability and uptime for critical areas like external users and customers.

Each of these design patterns can be applied to provide increased application resilience. While these examples talk about website integration, these patterns can be applied to other areas of integration as well.

A well-designed solution around the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation system can actually increase the availability and uptime of the solution as a whole to levels above what Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation delivers out-of-the-box. In some critical areas for example, the solution can continue to be available even when the product is taking a planned or unplanned outage.

Finally, there are a few other process and deployment related solution design considerations that can actually provide better gains in availability and uptime at a much lower cost than technological and redundancy based solutions.