IBM ‘turbo pack’ extends WebSphere

Catering to the computing needs of corporate users hungry for more speed and capacity, IBM on Thursday delivered a beta version of WebSphere-based software that automates increased performance on demand.

Described by company officials as a sort of “turbo pack,” the new WebSphere Extended Deployment is purposely designed for those IT shops with significant computing resources that regularly must deal with hard-to-predict spikes in Web traffic.

The software, which runs on top of the company’s standard WebSphere Application Server, helps to more efficiently balance and share workloads among dozens of applications that handle millions of transactions every day, by adjusting on the fly to a range of different business applications.

“A lot of users now want features that go above and beyond Java, which is why we are now focusing more on providing them with software that makes a pool of application servers highly available and increases performance to where they can get linear scalability even as their workloads increase,” said Bob Sutor, director of IBM’s WebSphere Foundation Software.

IBM is packaging the new software separately from WebSphere Application Server because it makes it easier for IBM and other developers to build applications on top of WebSphere that can also automatically take advantage of WebSphere Extended Deployment “after the fact,” Sutor said.

“As we move into 2005, we expect that people will be using XD with WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundations, WebSphere Portal, and WebSphere Commerce servers, alongside products from ISVs,” Sutor said.

Cigna Healthcare’s IT group has been working with early versions of WebSphere Extended and is exploring ways to tie together online applications that can significantly reduce the amount of resources needed to run them.

“We have set a goal of eliminating 25 percent of our server operating expenses for the 37 applications that make up Cigna.com. We are looking to this product to optimize how we’re using our computing capacity so we can in turn reduce the need to buy more servers to cover our peak demand,” said Ben Flock, Cigna’s vice president of virtualization.

The new product is designed to work with IBM’s Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator to monitor the efficiency of a network and to continually rebalance it by distributing unexpected workloads to hardware and software that is not being used. Administrators have the option of manually confirming these optimizations before they are automatically carried out, a company spokesman said.

The product is also capable of partitioning and dividing larger jobs over many different processors and server-level applications. It can assign individual application servers, for instance, in order to reduce bottlenecks, thereby allowing tasks to be carried out faster, company officials said.

“As the market enters this third generation of Web application servers, users are asking for not just Web services standards and SOAs [service-oriented architectures], but given their experience with live mainframes, they want that type of quality of service but in a more distributed environment,” Sutor said.

Analysts see the new software as a natural evolution of WebSphere, one that IBM should be making given its vision of the coming on demand world, along with similar visions of their archrivals.

“All of the major infrastructure vendors are in the process of building out their visions for their next generation architectures, which generally call for products to help create more dynamic and fluid environments through things like partitioning, dynamic resource allocations, and pooling. So in this context, this is a very natural move for IBM to make,” said Stephen O’Grady, senior analyst at RedMonk.

The four platforms the product will support include a Linux on an Intel platform, and versions for the Solaris, AIX, and Windows operating systems. All four versions also work with Java Extended Edition 2.0.

IBM is initially testing the beta among 10 different users and will keep it to just those 10 into the fall. The company plans to refresh the beta sometime in August and to make the finish product available by the end of this year’s fourth quarter, according to Sutor.