Core Services
Architecture & Design
Organizations in every industry are seeking to reduce capital expenditures and operational costs. While new technologies are exciting, they can be complex and costly to implement.
Instrumental’s Architectural and System Design Services provide planning and modeling that will scale and adapt to business needs. These services create a critical link between the current and future state of the mission.
Specific services include:
System and Component Sizing
- Analysis of current or projected workload requirements to determine adequate capacity for systems or individual components.
- Recommendations for pertinent system or component design characteristics (e.g., processor count, memory size, I/O count) or configuration parameters and/or vendor and product suggestions. This is similar to capacity planning, but generally executed as a one-time assessment of the client's needs (e.g., at initial procurement or deployment) rather than as an ongoing and repeatable process.
Architectural and System Design
- Creation and specification of complex site or application-specific systems
- Problem statement definition
- Operational domain definition
- Use-case scenario analysis
- Constraint identification
- Behavioral requirements definition (function and performance)
- Technology Assessment
- Definition of system services
- Logical and physical aggregation and partitioning of system services
- Component specification
- Logical and physical interface specification
- Architectural and system simulation and modeling
Performance Optimization
- Optimization of site-specific performance characteristics: minimization of latency, price-performance ratio and cost-of-ownership
- Maximization of throughput, reliability and security
- Workload and resource utilization balancing
- Data compression and expansion
- Tradeoff analysis and reporting
- Component configuration and documentation
Server Consolidation
- Reduction in cost of ownership through rational reduction in customer application server deployment
- Application porting from high single-application server configurations to reduced-count multiple-application server configurations
- Risk assessment and reduction
- Server, storage and LAN sizing
- Cost of ownership reduction assessment
- Proof of concept
- Reliability and service-level testing
Capacity Planning
- Assessment, analysis, projection and reporting of system resource needs as a function of projected workload alteration (mix and size)
- Occasion-specific or recurring services
- Workload modeling
- Workload modeling process and tool delivery
- System modeling
- System simulation
- Reusable capacity planning environment creation and deployment
- Workload-experiment design
- Experiment execution
- Workload-impact analysis
- Performance projections
- Bottleneck identification
- Resource requirements analysis and reporting
- Component and subsystem procurement recommendation
- Periodic or one-time capacity planning reports
Requirements Validation
- Demonstration of correctness or appropriate applicability of system or component requirements as currently defined
- Problem statement review
- Operational domain analysis
- Use-case scenario analysis
- Constraint verification
- Customer, user, or marketing personnel review
- System simulation and modeling
- Reporting and documentation
Architectural Validation
- Demonstration of appropriateness of system or subsystem architecture as currently defined, proposed, or implemented
- Problem statement review
- Operational domain analysis
- Use-case scenario analysis
- Constraint verification
- Customer, user, or marketing personnel review
- Prototyping and proof of concept
- System simulation and modeling
- Reporting and documentation
Design Verification
- Demonstration of correctness of system, component, algorithm, or process implementation
- Design specification review
- System or component test and analysis
- Benchmarking
- Inspection
- Prototyping and proof of concept
- Modeling and simulation
- Reporting and documentation
Virtual Prototyping
- Proof of system, component, algorithm, or process concepts using modeling and simulation techniques
- Requirements analysis
- Design specification review
- Model design, implementation and documentation
- Behavioral experimentation, demonstration and test
- What-if exploration
- Behavioral analysis
- Reporting and documentation
Data Storage Design and Implementation
- Creation and deployment of complex site or application-specific file and data storage systems
- Problem statement definition
- Operational domain definition
- Use-case scenario analysis
- Constraint identification
- File modeling and semantics
- Behavioral requirements definition (function and performance)
- Archival policy definition
- Networking and distribution requirements
- Reliability, availability and backup/restoration assessment and design
- Technology assessment
- Component specification
- Logical and physical interface specification
- Component procurement
- Hierarchical storage management design, implementation and test
- Virtual tape system design, implementation and test
- Capacity assessment
- File system modeling and simulation
- Documentation
Process Management, Analysis and Development
- Creation and application of process analysis environments in connection with systems (primarily using modeling and simulation techniques) and their application to process development and optimization
- Requirements analysis
- Model design and implementation
- Experimentation and what-if analysis
- Job and task flow analysis
- Workload analysis
- Resource consumption analysis
- Throughput, latency and resource utilization analysis
- Optimization of process flow, rework and error handling
- Reporting and documentation