New IBM WebSphere Software Enables Businesses to Achieve Operational Excellence for Business Application Infrastructure

Market Wire, August, 2005

IBM today announced the availability of new software that delivers the combined capabilities of autonomic and grid computing to maximize the effectiveness of a business' application infrastructure. The new software, WebSphere Extended Deployment Version 6.0, can deliver business value through effective use of an existing IT infrastructure, support for mixed workload and server types, support for new advanced data caching, and improvements in manageability and monitoring.

Built upon the foundation created by WebSphere Extended Deployment V5.1, the new release extends the three product functional areas: dynamic operations, high-performance computing, and extended manageability, while including a new functional area -- business flexibility. WebSphere Extended Deployment Version 6.0 enables systems to support large volumes of diverse workloads more efficiently, while differentiating based on the business value of these workloads, so as not to jeopardize work important to the business. This WebSphere software provides an infrastructure for extreme application performance with advanced functionality delivered around partitioned transaction processing environments. In the midst of all this elevated functionality is a focus on system manageability, providing easy-to-use administration features focused on the production operations environment.

With a unique ability to support growing customer demand for building service-oriented architectures (SOAs), WebSphere Extended Deployment also eases management of Java resources while securing access to those resources and services. These capabilities allow an organization to ensure all IT resources are operating at full enablement according to the business needs; the cornerstone of a successful SOA deployment. These features and functions further demonstrate that WebSphere offers customers a comprehensive range of deployment platforms and business models, which include traditional license purchases as well as open source support from IBM's recent acquisition of Gluecode and continued donations to the Geronimo efforts.

WebSphere Extended Deployment extends the capabilities of WebSphere Application Server, the #1 ranked application server by IDC*, and the WebSphere platform, which delivers an excellent foundation for a Service Oriented Architecture. The features delivered with WebSphere Extended Deployment enable the implementation of a "Business Grid" -- a dynamic, goals directed, high-performance environment for running both online and long-running applications in WebSphere middleware software. This technology is designed with self-managing and autonomic capabilities to help customers deal with IT scalability and performance challenges, while remaining cost effective.

According to Bill Noffsinger, systems administrator at the University of Florida's Advanced Computing & Information Systems Laboratory, "The business flexibility introduced in WebSphere Extended Deployment version 6.0 will facilitate the execution and management of the many compute-intensive workloads that we support. Having relied on the WebSphere platform to effectively reap the full value of our IT resources, the latest version of WebSphere Extended Deployment has proven to be a valuable offering that continues to help us maximize our IT investments."

Designed to deliver enhanced quality to business applications, WebSphere Extended Deployment, V6.0 provides the following benefits:

Improved Resource Utilization -- uses existing WebSphere resources to flexibly run a variety of workloads and application types, all prioritized and managed with autonomic methods against specified business goals.

Increased Performance, Transactional Reliability, and Scalability -- utilize application partitioning for targeted transactions, while leveraging the new ObjectGrid function for distributed data caching to increase transactional speed.

Automated Responsiveness -- sense and respond on demand to seamlessly accommodate fluctuations in workload across the application infrastructure.

Interruption-free Application Update -- can manage the deployment of multiple application versions without interruption in service; while providing a highly available application infrastructure with built in fail over support.

Extended Manageability -- confidently and efficiently manage the application infrastructure with a real-time, aggregated, at-a-glance assessment of application health and performance. Proactive, autonomic detection and correction of health issues results in increased performance and stability.

Increased Business Flexibility -- enable heterogeneous business environments to efficiently support mixed workloads: batch, compute-intensive, and OLTP, as well as mixed application server types: WebSphere and non-WebSphere software, while providing the ability to run on and integrate a broad set of platforms.

Reduced Cost of Ownership -- by maximizing the effectiveness of the IT environment and automating system responsiveness, businesses can experience lowered costs and improved efficiency of their existing resources.