By Rachel Chalmers
IBM Corp has released version 2.0 of the Performance Pack, a member of the same family as its WebSphere application server. The high-performance web hosting technology was originally developed to run the site for the Nagano Winter Olympic Games. Alistair Rennie, program director of WebSphere marketing, explains that Performance Pack’s real strengths boil down to three functions: intelligent load balancing; a caching proxy server and an enterprise file system.
Now two critical functions have been added. The first is differentiated quality of service. Organizations can use this to define the class of service that a particular web user should receive. For example, an airline could identify a particular frequent flyer by user ID. Trading and e-commerce sites could give priority service to an individual who’s actually going to do business with them, rather than someone who’s just going to surf, and call center staff could see confidential business information as well as the web pages that are accessible to customers. The second major improvement is the ease of use of the product itself. In the past, this product has been the domain of bitheads, Rennie admits. He hopes the new interface will lower the barrier of entry and provide access to new class of customers.
As well as these new features in Performance Pack itself, IBM has announced the imminent launch of Cache Manager. This entry-level product is designed to suit the needs of small and medium-sized businesses as well as departments in enterprises. Cache Manager strips out the caching functionality from Performance Pack, making it available to adminstrators of networks with only 10 to 50 end users. Rennie explains that the product should allow such administrators to cost-effectively locate content and thus manage their bandwidth costs. He adds that the product will be priced aggressively at around $700 per server when it becomes available in May.
