WebSphere Extended Deployment

Dynamic, goals-directed, high performance environment for WebSphere Applications

What's New in WebSphere Extended Deployment V6.1?

WebSphere® Extended Deployment offers a dynamic, goal-directed, high-performance environment for running mixed application types and workload patterns in WebSphere. With these capabilities, you can optimize the resource utilization and management of your deployments, while enhancing the quality of service of your business-critical applications.

WebSphere Extended Deployment V6.1 provides the following new capabilities:

Dynamic operations: New centralized workload management and health policy support has been added for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) servers and support expanded for other application servers including workload management, application provisioning, health monitoring, and additional administration features. This will enable a more consistent approach to achieving service levels and health policies across a heterogeneous set of application servers.

Reliable, scalable, high-performance: ObjectGrid is enhanced to provide performance improvements across a wide range of application scenarios. The number of Java™ Virtual Machines (JVM) and size of data sets supported is significantly increased, query capabilities have been added allowing for parallel operations across the ObjectGrid configurations, and applications using different schemas for the underlying ObjectGrid information can execute concurrently improving application availability.

Flexible support for mixed application types: Support for new job types is delivered. A new batch-like job referred to as native execution is now supported and with the addition of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) support multi-media type applications involving integration of voice and video are now possible. WebSphere Extended Deployment's workload management technology can support a diverse mix of application types while ensuring service levels are met for priority requests.

Improved installation and maintenance: To improve overall operations of complex systems a new centralized install manager has been added reducing installation and maintenance efforts. New, customizable health monitoring policies allow users to determine which situations to monitor and the actions to take when a specific situation arises.

Flexible purchase options: You now have more choices to address your business challenges. In addition to the full product containing all features, you have the option of ordering the following separately chargeable components. The Operations Optimization for dynamic operations, the Data Grid for high-performance and Compute Grid for running and controlling batch-like jobs.

IBM WebSphere Extended Deployment V6.1 delivers the following enhanced capabilities:

For operational efficiency and consistency, organizations have typically centered their application infrastructures on standard platforms such as WebSphere Application Server. However, many organizations today are expanding their application infrastructures to better incorporate innovative server-side scripting technologies such as PHP and to complement their infrastructures with open source Java application servers. This is especially true as service-oriented architectures (SOA) continue to drive business services composed of multiple application components.

These environments offer organizations the ability to streamline their Web development and presence, and to gain flexibility in application enablement and deployment, yet introduce a set of challenges related to supporting an expanded application infrastructure footprint. These challenges often include the ability to:

Optimize infrastructure investment; dynamically allocate finite infrastructure resources to when and where they're needed, in real time and according to business policies
Support a diverse set of application environments in a consistent way and with mission-critical qualities of service
Previous versions of WebSphere Extended Deployment have concentrated on delivering intelligent, goals-directed workload management, infrastructure optimization, and operational management primarily on the WebSphere Application Server platform. WebSphere Extended Deployment V6.0 introduced traffic shaping and prioritization of workload requests to application servers other than WebSphere categorized as generic endpoints and aggregated as generic server clusters.

With WebSphere Extended Deployment V6.1, IBM significantly expands these capabilities to extend dynamic operations, infrastructure virtualization and intelligent application placement to a broad range of application infrastructure resources (PHP, BEA WebLogic, JBoss, Apache Tomcat, and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition). In addition, organizations can administer these application infrastructure resources in a consistent way utilizing an enhanced operational management framework.

For both WebSphere and other application environments, organizations can dynamically manage workload according to service policy, prioritize and govern application flow control to avoid overload conditions, and intelligently place applications utilizing WebSphere Extended Deployment's dynamic clusters.