IBM has unveiled a new version of its WebSphere
Application Server software, which is designed to protect
applications from server downtime and boost enterprise efforts to
build a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Version 6 of the WebSphere Application Server can detect server
outages and save and process internet transactions to minimise the
financial impact from downtime.
The latest version of the Java-based server software also offers
support for new web services integration standards and a new
messaging engine for boosting application performance, said Bob
Sutor, IBM's director of WebSphere foundation software.
The features are designed to save enterprises the exorbitant
costs that can be associated with an application going down, even
for a minute, Sutor said. At the high end, a brokerage firm, for
example, could lose as much as $6.5m (£3.7m) an hour from
application downtime; an online consumer banking application could
cost $17,000 an hour for downtime, according to IBM.
"If these transactions do not take place or are stalled in some
way, someone is going to have to pay," Sutor said.
While restarting a server can take five minutes, the WebSphere
application server software can grab the history of what the
disabled server was doing and hand it off to another fail-over
server within the datacentre or at another location in less than 10
seconds.
The application availability features are a response to the
needs of high-end users, said Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current
Analysis.
"That is where WebSphere excels - features for the extreme high
end, for large corporations that need a lot of assurances and a lot
of fault tolerance," Willett said. "This just senses things and
does the recovery automatically so there is more automatic
fail-over capabilities and a little more sensing when something is
about to go wrong."
This new functionality is designed to meet user demands to have
the same type of confidence level for application availability
provided in IBM's flagship CICS Transaction Server to be provided
by Version 6, said Dennis Byron, an analyst with IDC.
"There are many applications - primarily financial transactions
- where users require the certainty that the transaction is
completed," he said.
As part of its continued push to support enterprise efforts to
develop a SOA, the new version includes support for web services
standards, including WS-Transactions, WS-Security and WS-I Basic
Profile 1.1.
WS-Transactions assures web service transactions are delivered,
while WS-Security authenticates communications between web
services. WS-I Basic is used for the development of interoperable
web services.
In addition, IBM has written a new messaging engine for the
application server to boost performance and support simpler
connections to the enterprise messaging backbone. For developers,
Version 6 also features a new wizards-based drag-and-drop
environment designed to automate the most common application
development steps.
The version of the application server software is expected to be
available before the end of the year. IBM did not release pricing
information.
Heather Havenstein writes for Computerworld