XD gives WebSphere a B-12 shot Catering to the computing needs of corporate users hungry for more speed and capacity, IBM last week delivered a beta version of WebSphere software that automates increased performance depending on changing business demands.The new WebSphere Extended Deployment add-on pack is tailored for IT shops that have significant computing resources dedicated to dealing with hard-to-predict spikes in Web traffic.The software, which runs on top of the company’s WebSphere Application Server, helps efficiently balance and share workloads among dozens of applications that typically handle millions of transactions per day. “Users now want more than just the latest Java feature, which is why we are focusing on providing software that makes a pool of application servers highly available [in an effort] to increase performance to where they can get linear scalability as their workloads increase,” said Bob Sutor, director of WebSphere foundation software at IBM.WebSphere Extended Deployment is designed to work with IBM’s Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator to monitor the efficiency of a network and to rebalance it by distributing unexpected workloads to hardware and software that is not in use.One analyst endorsed the initiative. “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,” said Stephen O’Grady, senior analyst at RedMonk. Technology Industry