Software Development |
Integration and Application Infrastructure |
Integrating Data and Content |
Collaboration and Human Interaction |
Intelligent Management |
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Mobile and Speech Middleware Portals Commerce Product Information Mgmt Go to official IBM websphere site Portal Competition: The Battle for Customer Information in the Presence of Privacy Concerns About WebsphereWebSphere refers to a brand of IBM software products, although the term also popularly refers to one specific product: WebSphere Application Server (WAS). WebSphere helped define the middleware software category and is designed to set up, operate and integrate e-business applications across multiple computing platforms using web technologies. It includes both the run-time components (like the application server) and the tools to develop applications that will run on WAS.WebSphere is built using open standards such as the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), XML and Web Services. Multiple IBM labs around the world participate in creating WebSphere run-time products and development tools. WebSphere eXtended Deployment - WebSphere Application Server V5.1 Extended Deployment Edition (WebSphere XD) was initially released in October 2004 as an addon for WebSphere 5.1.1 or WebSphere WBISF 5.1 (integration offering). XD provides advanced features for both administrators who manage multiple J2EE based applications and developers building advanced applications that require asymmetric clustering techniques. Administrator benefits (ie load balancing) - Many businesses run multiple server farms but wish to consolidate them into a single smaller server farm because most server farms are underutilizied or over provisioned. The boxes are typically running at 10% load which is quite costly and is not flexible. For example, one server farm goes hot and maxes out while the farm in the next room is still basically idle at 10%. XD allows administrator to define a single cluster (a node group) then monitor the workload and dynamically decide which boxes in the node group should host which application in order to meet these goals. If application A currently has a response time of 1.5 seconds then XD will add run A on more nodes and reduce the number of nodes running B and C to bring more resources to application A so it can meet its goal. XD can also predict that A will likely exceed its response time in 10 minutes based on a trend and react in anticipation of the event. This greatly simplifies the life of an administrator and allows the machines to be more efficiently used than a conventional multiple, independent farm of farms approach. XD also offers options to generate various email alerts when conditions are exceeded, it can restart servers when they appear to have a memory leak or after X requests. Developer benefits - Traditional J2EE applications work well for a large class of applications. The class can broadly be categorized as applications that run in a stateless symmetric cluster in front of a database: There are other applications that do not work well in such an environment, for example, an electronic trading system in a bank. Such applications typically use tricks that can greatly improve performance such as partitioning, multi-threading and write through caching. These are applications that can exploit asymmetric clustering. An asymmetric cluster is practically the opposite of a symmetric cluster: | |||||||