T he design of flexible, scalable and performant yet affordable systems from paper to maintenance through deployment stages is one of the hardest challenges for an enterprise. The challenge is increasingly higher as the architecture gets decentralized and expanded to include SoC (System on Chip)

A successful system architecture is one of the most important pieces of any technology based project. A failed decision at the initial stage of the design can have enormous repercussions that might show themselves only later on when the system is in production stages.

A correct design needs to account for the integration or design of all the systems involved, typically starting from the hardware and low level communication protocols, the higher level communication protocols, data storage, data analysis and user interaction with the system. It also needs to solve the scalability problems or at least acknowledge the levels at which the system would start a performance degradation. It’s important that all the costs are taken into account and that they would respond to the business needs.

The design of an optimal system architecture is even more complex as it has to account for the fact that at the initial stages of a project, some of the business needs are unknown, hence the design needs to be highly flexible to accommodate them.

If we analyze most of the challenges of the current buzz word trends, IoT (Internet of Things), SoC (Systems on Chip), IoA (Internet of Array) or Big Data, we can observe that most of them are System Architecture related.

Traditionally most of the data used to be generated and consumed inside the data center, and most of the concerns were based around availability, reliability, scalability, performance, security and price. Now, as system include more and more geographically disseminated hardware, new concerns arise. We now need to think even about the electricity consumption impact of using a given communication or encryption scheme in some embedded devices; we now have 10$ SoC or embedded servers, but servers nevertheless, which sometimes even have high availability requirements; we now must think about the data quality of the sensor read-outs and about the implications in the business core of disconnection events of a given part of the system.

Knowledge Roses has the expertise to help you, both in the early stages of the project definition as later on when a need to correct or improve calls for the re-engineering of the system architecture.