2.2.1 Inventory of site assets

Take an inventory of your existing WebSphere Commerce site assets, which include:

Topology information is required to figure out any single points of failure, as well as any performance bottlenecks that might be there. For example, after you have ensured that you do not have a single point in failure, then what level of redundancy do you have in your site? How many cluster members are allowed to go offline before it impacts your site's performance or availability? Is the number acceptable? Along the same lines, is the failover strategy or detection time, such as in case of IBM DB2 HADR, acceptable to your business? Gathering information such as the following is required to build a site's topology:
Machines
Instances
WebSphere Application Server Cluster members
Web servers
Databases
High-level architecture of the site
Development environments
Build environment
Test environment
Staging/Authoring environment
Production environment

  • Custom code developed

    Ensure that you have all your custom source code available in a code repository. There may be situations when you need to diagnose or recompile the code and having the binary will not be sufficient. Also, use the following list to identify whether you have appropriate test environments to properly test for any changes in the following that may be required:
    Enterprise Java Beans and commands
    Custom Java code
    Java Server Pages
    Database schema customizations
    Code deployment scripts
    Data loading scripts
    WebSphere Commerce tools, and so on

    • Existing business processes

    To ensure that existing processes continue to work flawlessly, you first need to identify them. You also need to identify the priority and best times of execution of various maintenance or repetitive tasks. For example, what is the best time to mass load data or publish catalog content into your database? Or, when should the scheduled jobs run and with what priority, and so on? The priority and schedule of the jobs have significant impact on a site's performance.

    • Integration points

    Integration points require the same considerations as the core WebSphere Commerce assets that you may have. These include:
    WebSphere family of products, for example, MQ, LDAP, messaging, and so on
    Third-party software, for example, payments, taxation, and so on
    Back-end integration
    xxxx