IBM said WebSphere version 5.0.2 will give enterprises the ability to take untapped resources across an enterprise and make them available where and when they’re needed, resulting in a single, virtual system.
In an interview with ComputerWire, IBM’s Bob Sutor, director of WebSphere infrastructure software, said the latest version of WebSphere adds grid functionality as well as capabilities to handle what IBM calls autonomic computing, by which it means self-healing and self-tuning features.
Enterprise IT departments want to stop building monolithic systems that lack flexibility, said Sutor. The new alternative is to have WebSphere dynamically choose alternative components and paths, measure their response time, and based on that automatically tune for performance.
One immediate stumbling block with the latest grid capability of WebSphere however is that today it only enables single clusters running a particular application – such as online trading – to act as a virtual grid. However, Sutor said that future versions of WebSphere will extend this capability to disparate parts of a company, and automatically coordinate multiple clusters of servers running various business applications.
IBM has developed what it calls a traffic cop-like software product that automatically monitors application workload, and routes traffic to one server or another according to its load at a given time. It allows a server cluster to operate as a single environment.
IBM said it took two years to develop the technology – a combined effort from IBM Research and the company’s software development teams.
In IBM’s vision of grid computing, disparate computers and systems in an organization or among organizations become one large, integrated computing system. That single system can then be turned loose on problems and processes too large and intensive for any single computer to easily handle.
As well as the new grid features, the latest version of WebSphere includes Performance Advisor which uses live data collected from a running system to analyze changes and recommend actions to improve performance. It also includes Automatic Backup Cluster, which enables customers to automatically configure their system to set up a back-up cluster of servers in case the primary cluster fails.
5.0.2 also sees the addition of support for Microsoft’s Windows 2003 server to the 25 platforms that WebSphere already supports, which include Linux, Windows XP, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and IBM’s eServer family of iSeries, pSeries and zSeries. Sutor said WebSphere’s multiple operating systems support means it can act like an operating system for the network.
IBM claimed that WebSphere 5.0.2 is the first production-level application server to support the WS-I 1.0 web services standard, which gives developers an advantage in building web services applications across heterogeneous environments.
Source: Computerwire
