Relationship to Infrastructure Management

The domain of infrastructure management has expanded over recent years to include bare metal, virtualisation, containerisation and depending on your definition, micro-services, lambda functions – etc.

These domains are additionally divided across the spheres of network, compute and storage and may be delivered and operated in a public, private or hybrid cloud context.

Innovation never ceases and it is likely therefore that additional new classes of technology infrastructure will be created and evolved in future also.

In order to handle this ever-changing mix of requirements, ArenaCore is build on a common data model that allows flexible definition of existing and new technology types based on customisable rules for containment and connection of resource type mixtures (as already mentioned in the section on Key ArenaCore Capabilities).

The ability to customise handling for the specific peculiarities of each technology type is also discussed in the section on Key ArenaCore Capabilities (see Customisation capability).

In addition to these capabilities, it worth mentioning two more generalised aspects of the ArenaCore platform that are relevant for definition of products across differing technology types.

Network structure generalisation

ArenaCore has not yet been developed very far around networking technology requirements. It is expected however that ArenaCore will need to support commonly encountered network structures.

Networking principles vary greatly across the various types of new and old network technologies that are in use in the context of today’s cloud / ICT scenarios. Historically network types have been divided between Connection Oriented (eg. ATM) and Connectionless (e.g. TCP/IP) networks. For example some categories of MPLS are effectively connection-oriented in their intent. And with the more recent evolution towards SD-WAN, the winds of change are continuing to blow. Technologies such as OpenFlow and P4 have appeared in the ‘hype cycle’ also.

ArenaCore is architected on a network data model that supports both Connection oriented and Connectionless network types, and this model is turn positioned on top of the common ArenaCore data model mentioned above.

The stage is set for further exploration of new network technologies as they progress.

Capacity and Performance Specification

Capacity and Performance are key attributes of most infrastructure elements. ArenaCore provides generalised support for definition of structured Capacity and Performance types. These may be applied to technology product elements of differing types, such that they can subsequently be compared and summarised on a common basis.

Please continue to the Relationship to DevOps section.