Moving a Website

Reggie A. Conner Professor Stan Buch CIS 210 Term Paper 09/09/2012 Abstract In this paper I will assume a new company has hired me to manage a project that will move the old Website from an externally hosted solution to an internal one. The company’s leadership is very concerned about redundancy for their site, insisting that a back-up site be available as a failover in case the main site goes down. In addition, they want the site redesigned to allow customers to order products online.

As part of my job, I must complete a 10-to-15 page paper that follows this project through the system development life cycle (SDLC). This assignment will require I to do the following: * Discuss what it will take to build a Web architecture, move an existing Website with minimal downtime, and provide a disaster recovery solution to ensure the site is always available. * * The Web architecture should describe and justify operating system choices (i. e. , Linux, Apache, MYSQL, PHP, Windows, IIS, SQL, etc. ). Evaluate alternatives to the company self-hosting the site. * Build a Gantt chart using Microsoft Project or equivalent software, showing all tasks associated with implementing the Website. * The chart should include a minimum of five (5) tasks, each with three (3) sub-tasks. * Explain and justify the system architecture you have selected. * Illustrate the system architecture using Visio or equivalent software. * Create a use case that documents the event of a customer ordering a bag of chips from the new Website. The use case should include a graphical representation using Visio or equivalent software and a text description of the events. * Discuss the support operations that the internally hosted Website will require after implementation. * Explain how you will evaluate the performance of the new site and the success of your project. Term Paper Whether you are planning to implement a new site or upgrading an existing site to meet growing needs, the following provides guidelines for meeting the performance and availability demands of today’s online business environment.

The mature business site is multi-tiered, with several hardware components, including: • Firewalls and routers • Load balancers • Web servers/front ends • Application servers • Database servers • File servers • Storage hardware The software environment that runs on this hardware can be equally complex, and may include: • Operating system software (i. e. , Linux, Apache, MYSQL, PHP, Windows, IIS, SQL, etc. ) • Web/application server software • Database software and applications • Storage management software (backup/recovery, clustering and failover, etc. Design an architecture that ensures availability. Build redundancy and scalability in your design so the architecture will grow as your business grows. Choose highly available and manageable system platforms. Make sure that the foundation for the various components is as robust as possible, while creating an operating environment in which you can manage constantly. All of the critical components of the site should be built on platforms that optimize the availability and manageability of the total solution.

The combined hardware/software platform should keep downtime of all kinds low – including unplanned failures and planned, administrative downtime. Requirements are a high mean time between failures for all hardware components, fast recovery from outages when they do occur, good administrative tools and policies for system maintenance, and support for online administrative activities where possible. Choose solutions that optimize performance regardless of system load, as the site needs to run at peak performance, all the time.

Many factors affect site performance, from architecture to application design to processor speeds. Good application design is the most important contributor to performance. After that, processor speed is significant. Building on this groundwork, you can achieve better performance by optimizing I/O and off-loading data-intensive activities from production systems. The business site both hosts and generates a rich array of data that is a critical asset to the business: web content, user profiles, and e-business transaction data.

It is critical to protect this data against loss from a variety of potential risks, including disk failure, application or user error, and physical damage due to localized disasters. Highly available storage configurations do not protect data against software or user errors. Recovery from some errors typically require the presence of adequate backups. It is imperative to maintain good backup procedures. The more frequent the backup, the faster the recovery in time of error. Databases have special backup and recovery needs.

Oracle databases in particular consist of many files that must be restored appropriately for a database recovery to take place. Although basic backup and recovery products can work for some Oracle databases, databases of a critical nature or significant size require Oracle-specific backup tools that can support online backups and recoveries, and can handle archived redo logs and other control files appropriately. Whatever tool you use, taking frequent backups, testing recoveries, and cross-training DBAs are all crucial to effective Oracle administration.

Be sure to protect the applications. Site availability depends on the availability of many components. You must take an application-level view of availability and protect all of the components required to deliver online services to your customers. The best approach for this is clustering software that leverages the hardware redundancy you built into your site to provide sophisticated failover at an application level. There are different approaches to clustering, depending on whether or not the various nodes of the cluster will access the same data at the same time.

Be sure to always plan for change. Change is the one apparent constant in the Internet economy. Your site infrastructure must be able to adapt to change rapidly as you add new services or change strategies – providing fast time-to-market with reliable site performance. Evaluate alternatives to the company self-hosting the site. Alternatives to self hosting sites are web based hosting. Web hosting is the ability to move a business or information, product content, and research to the Internet.

Actually, web hosting service is an Internet hosting service that permits an individual or an organization to provide their websites accessible via World Wide Web. Web hosts are those firms or organizations that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. These also furnish data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center. Create a use case that documents the event of a customer ordering a bag of chips from the new Website.

A proposed system is shop online. The application provides the online shopping facility available to everyone. Any type of the product will be available for the customer. In this case a bag of chips. Shop online concentrates more on user friendly interfaces and promotes users to make purchases faster, and easier. In the User interface of Shop online there will be accomplished purchases with options to find new products available, most purchased, and customer satisfied products. All products in the website will be highlighted with the image of the product.

By clicking on the image, it will take you directly to the buy page, where the customer can purchase easily. Shop online is also provided with a customer support page. Using this page a customer can get assistance from the available CSR online. As security issues pay a major importance of online shopping, extra attention is applied to security. A digital signature is incorporated to ensure protection for the customer. Discuss the support operations that the internally hosted Website will require after implementation.

Explain how you will evaluate the performance of the new site and the success of your project. Manage Application Service Requests (application problem resolution, functionality, new structures). 1 Document 2 Prioritize 3 Execute 4 Collaborate with operations 5 Help Desk Application Monitoring & Maintenance 1 Schedule and monitor automated processes. Application Patching (including testing) • Internal controls set up and monitoring Database Monitoring & Maintenance Interface Maintenance 1