Building and maintaining a solid foundation for your Enterprise Performance Management environment

The senior infrastructure staff at PureApps have years of experience in designing and implementing some of the most complex environments to facilitate requirements such as high availability, robust security constraints or disaster recovery solutions.

In order to reach a conclusion on the most appropriate design for any given environment, our approach follows a methodology where the design process is one of the most crucial components.

The remainder of this page describes the various elements that we incorporate into the design phase to ensure the smooth and successful delivery of Hyperion infrastructure.

Discovery

A requirements gathering initiative is carried out during the discovery phase. This is where we aim to find out how the system will be used, what components are in scope and to ensure that the Hyperion system is properly integrated into the target environment.

An understanding of the existing technical environment and the type of technology already in place is important as this will need to be used to host the system. This is also important when dealing with budget constraints where we aim to design a solution that maximizes on the use of the existing technologies and hardware to keep costs to a minimum.

Once this information has been defined, it is then used as the raw material for the design phase.

Design

In our methodology, prior to the build phase, we collaborate with the you to produce an 'Infrastructure Design Specification' document. This ensures a smooth approval process of the final design. The details of this document addresses many constraints and considerations including:

• Scope of the engagement (what will be installed).
• The business requirements and intended usage of the Hyperion components by the business.
• How the system will facilitate the internal policies and design principles of the customer's existing environment.
• Technical integration between the components and the clients environment.
• The technical requirements and prerequisites for the Hyperion components in scope.

The 'Infrastructure Design Specification' document covers the following areas:

• Server architecture schema layout diagrams for all environments in scope and their roles.
• Specification for the Hyperion servers. This will allow the client to complete a bill of materials and process the order the necessary hardware.
• Additional network requirements if any (shared storage, load balancing etc).
• Service account information for DCOM accounts and AD integration.
• Database requirements (specific settings for databases).
• A high level build plan describing who needs to do what and when.

Once the document has been completed and approved, the servers can be provisioned by the client and the build phase can begin.