By the end of the year, financial management company Merrill Lynch
intends to set up a Web services system designed to handle the
internal transactions needed to produce a stock quote.
Anthony Skipper, vice-president of architecture/Web services at
Merrill Lynch, said that although Web services can make data more
accessible, they are not necessarily an easy technology to adopt.
"The two biggest issues we have are security and performance," he
said.
Merrill Lynch chose a new product from Chutney to help on both
fronts, he said and demonstrated the basics of the new system at
the Networld+Interop conference.
Skipper said Web services such as Web Services Description Language
(WSDL) require lots of XML script to function, sometimes creating
objects six times as large as the data they describe. Beyond that,
he noted that Web services can create convoluted application paths,
which slow performance and can be CPU-intensive.
Merrill Lynch plans to use the Chutney product to reduce those
application path links and provide the Web services equivalent of a
Dynamic Link Library. A storage engine will sit next to Merrill
Lynch's application server cluster and help bypass the nonlinear
operations, Web service processing and I/O tasks, and network
transmissions normally associated with SOAP messaging.
Having a central Web services broker that calls and collects all
other SOAP messages, Skipper said, prevents developers from
accidentally skewing application paths.
"You do run into these situations where you've got developers who
are clueless," Skipper said. "And you have to protect against
that."
On the security side, Skipper intends to use Merrill Lynch's
existing single sign-on software from Netegrity in conjunction with
the Chutney storage engine.
He said that firm project dates have yet to be established and
didn't reveal the project cost. But he promised, "This is something
we've got to get done in the next six months."
The Chutney link library retails for $5,000 (£3,432) per CPU with a
20% annual maintenance fee. The storage unit costs $100,000
(£6,865) or $150,000 (£102,972) for those who want fail-over
capabilities installed in it.
Skipper said the lesson he is learned in putting together the
project is that Web services are not the quick and easy fix some
vendors make them out to be.
"The instant you've got to scale really high, you've got to worry
about the performance of your systems and you've got to get
something to help keep your costs down," he said. "A big Web
services deployment could create massive server overhead if you're
not careful."