IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Provides distributed object caching essential for elasticscalability and next-generation cloud environments

Highlights

■ A powerful, scalable, elastic in-

memory grid for your business-

critical applications

■ Offers broad range of usage

scenarios spanning from sim-

ple, in-process cache to power-

ful distributed grid

■ Scales elastically at runtime to

thousands of JVMs, limited only

by available physical machines,

and offers linear, predictable

scaling at predictable cost

■ Lowers the risks of data loss

and limit after-hours recovery

and reconciliation efforts

through automatic replication

of data delivering high availabil-

ity and fault tolerance

The IBM WebSphere® portfolio offers

extreme transaction processing (XTP)

capabilities that ensure, you have a

SMART SOA™-based application infra-

structure which can support your most

Extreme Transaction Processing

Today’s dynamic business environments

and economic uncertainty mean organi-

zations must work smarter to remain

competitive and respond to changing

customer demands. Key to working

smarter is business agility and cost

optimization. Our planet is becoming

increasingly smart, interconnected,

instrumented and intelligent. As more

people around the planet join the digital

world, they drive exponential growth of

business and non-business transac-

tions for everything from web com-

merce and RFID processing in dynamic

supply chains to real-time financial

interactions to on-line social networking

and gaming. Organizations need to

ensure that their critical applications

can meet the requirements of rapid

increases in demand, can deliver imme-

diate, consistent response, and can

scale as necessary.

demanding business-critical applica-

tions. WebSphere allows you to over-

come traditional IT performance

limitations to generate the levels of

global scale, process efficiencies, and

business intelligence needed for

smarter business outcomes, like

sustainable competitive advantage,

maximized revenues and avoidance of

potential fines stemming from inconsis-

tent response and SLA violations.

The IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale

product allows business applications to

process massive volumes of transac-

tions with extreme efficiency and near

linear scalability. WebSphere eXtreme

Scale is designed to work in heteroge-

neous environments across all leading

application server platforms and virtual-

ization environments.

WebSphere eXtreme Scale operates as

an in-memory grid that dynamically

processes, partitions, replicates, and

manages application data and business

logic across hundreds of servers.

It provides transactional integrity and

transparent fail-over to ensure high

availability, high reliability, and consistent

response times. WebSphere eXtreme

Scale is an essential distributed caching

platform from IBM for elastic scalability

and the next-generation cloud

environments.

WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides

the technology to enhance business

applications, including web commerce,

supply chain, financial, trading and even

on-line gaming, to form new, innovative

classes of business applications by

extending the data-caching concept

with advanced features. These applica-

tion enhancements can be realized by

utilizing WebSphere eXtreme Scale in

the following flexible scenarios and

configurations:

● Simple Data and Database Cache:

Applications can access data struc-tures to improve performance andthroughput using the WebSphereeXtreme Scale configuration as alocal cache. Caching the data inmemory attacks what is often thelargest part of a transaction’s pro-cessing time, waiting for the data toarrive. WebSphere eXtreme Scaleenhances this traditional data-caching scenario even further byoffering fail-over capability.

● Client/Grid with Near Cache: Havingthe data in memory is good. Whendealing with large volumes of data,applications can perform even bet-ter. A Java™ Virtual Machine(JVM™) can have a local eXtremeScale grid which sits in front of aremote grid serving as a “nearcache” for a subset of the data,allowing a client to leverage a verylarge remote cache to offload back-end processing or to speed access tocached results. The near cache is inthe same JVM as the applicationand provides local, in-processaccess to data. It contains a subsetof all the data in the grid and ischecked first when a record isrequested. If the record is not in thenear cache, then it is retrieved fromthe grid and put into the nearcache. The response time is reducedthe next time the same record isaccessed. The faster response timesfor the records you access oftenleads to faster response time for theuser. The near cache is alsoupdated when data writes go to thegrid. Applications can use the dis-tributed locking services providedby the remote grid to coordinateaccess to shared data across clients.

● Side cache/Java Persistence API

(JPA) cache plug-in: When applica-tions need information that is usedfrequently but does not changeoften, like a user’s profile, a sidecache offers significant performancebenefits. WebSphere eXtreme Scalecan be used as a side cache to storeobjects that have been retrievedfrom the backend. The applicationchecks the side cache first to see if itcontains a record. If there’s a cachemiss, then the data is retrieved fromthe backend and inserted into thecache.

● Real-Time Data and Event Mining:

When working with real time dataflows, the first challenge is filteringand organizing the data so theapplications can use it. A parti-tioned eXtreme Scale configurationcan subscribe to events and applythem to partitioned data thus sup-porting linear scalability and deter-ministic latency for theseapplications.

● Map/Reduce support: WebSphereeXtreme Scale clients can invokeagents that run against massiveamounts of data on multiple nodesin parallel. Clients can then aggre-gate and further process the resultsstored in the grid by the nodes.

Chirp on eXtreme Scale at IMPACT 2009

WebSphere eXtreme Scale caches can

potentially span thousands of JVMs and

support extremely large datasets. In

addition, WebSphere eXtreme Scale

includes efficient new algorithms to

allow in-memory caches to grow elasti-

cally as the number of available JVMs

or physical machines changes.

Traditional distributed cache products

use Map APIs as their primary pro-

gramming model. WebSphere eXtreme

Scale offers this and also allows graphs

of objects to be easily pushed to the

cache. WebSphere eXtreme Scale

allows simple Java objects to be anno-

tated and uses a simpler API to trans-

parently allow these graphs to be

fetched from the grid as well as to push

any changes made by the application

back to the grid. This significantly sim-

plifies programming compared with the

older JCache or Map-based APIs,

improving productivity of the application

developers by allowing them to focus

on the core business logic.

● In-Memory management: Includesin-memory management capabili-ties with the capacity to supportterabytes of data spread acrossthousands of servers. This allowsyour business application toseamlessly scale with the datagrowth.

● High availability and fault tolerance:

If a primary server fails, a replicais automatically promoted to bethe primary. Multiple replicas canbe supported. This can be doneasynchronously or synchronously,and is transparent to the applica-tion. The result is a businessapplication that is availablewhenever the client needs it.

● Fast application performance: Datais stored in memory so applica-tions have extremely fast (millisecond) access to data.Being able to access data inmemory means faster applicationsand less workload for the sup-porting database servers.

● Linear scalability: As data ortransaction volumes grow, moreservers can be added in a seam-less fashion to handle the addi-tional data and workload whilestill ensuring effective applicationaccess to data and consistent,predictable response times.

● Flexible definition of data location:

Ability to specify “zones” wheredata should reside, either withina server system, data center, orgeography, and have the systemtransparently manage data place-ment to those zones. A zone canbe a chassis, a building, or a dif-ferent geography. Synchronousreplicas reside in the same zoneas primary replicas with asyn-chronous replicas residing in dif-ferent zones. This offers moregranularity of shard placement,providing more fault tolerance.This allows your data store tosupport the availability con-straints unique to your business.

● Heterogeneous environment sup-

port: Supports and executes eitherin a standard Java EE compliantserver environment, or any JavaVirtual Machine compliant withJava SE V1.4 or beyond.Provides a common data fabricapproach that supports heteroge-neous server environments. Thismeans that data store technologyis accessible to many of your Javaapplications.

● “Drop-in” cache for enterprise

applications: WebSphere eXtremeScale includes a cache providerfor the WebSphere ApplicationServer dynamic cache service pro-vides a consistent distributed“drop-in” cache for enterpriseapplications. This brings a higherquality of service, linear scalabil-ity and high availability to bearon a broad variety of businessapplications utilizing, or inter-ested in utilizing, the WebSphereApplication Server dynamic cacheservice with minimal invasivechanges.

● Reporting and monitoring:

WebSphere eXtreme Scaleincludes implementations of met-ric access adapters to improveintegration with IBM Tivoli®Monitoring or Hyperic HQ,enabling comprehensive insightinto the operational behavior ofbusiness solutions.

● Ease of use: WebSphere eXtremeScale handles many of the com-mon retry and exception logictasks within the grid middleware.The request timeout for clientsremoves the burden from develop-ers for boiler-plate retry logic formost map interaction operations.Most retry-able conditions arehandled automatically, enablingdevelopers to focus on the busi-ness logic aspects of applicationdevelopment.

The IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale

product provides a comprehensive

elastic persistent store solution for the

business applications while offering:

— Building multi-tenant appli-cations has been greatly sim-plified. Map templates allowapplications to create newmaps on demand, avoidingthe need to use applicationdiscriminators in the keys orto create extra maps thatmay never be used.

— Implementation of byte arraymaps reduces the memoryfootprint of the grid cache,resulting in lower memorycosts and better performance.

— The indexing supports multi-ple attributes. This featurecan simplify index usagewhen querying multipleattributes and reduce theoverhead of having multipleindexes defined. Query hasalso been optimized to takeadvantage of compositeindexes.

— Operational flexibilityincludes the ability to snap-shot maps which allowsapplications to easily gener-ate snapshots for reportingpurposes, and with replicacompletion for incompletereplicas based on the lastreplica checkpoint and syn-chronous replication.

— With support for WebSphereReal Time, the industry-leading real-time Java offer-ing, WebSphere eXtremeScale enables XTP applica-tions to have more consistentand predictable responsetimes.

● Write-through caching: Write-through caching immediatelypropagates all changes from thein-memory cache to the backenddatabase as part of the transac-tion. This method results inlonger response times but guaran-tees all changes are persisted tothe backend database. Thisapproach also provides synchro-nization between the cache andbackend. This is valuable in situ-ations where the data must behardened to the backend datastore for the transactions to beconsidered complete.

● Write-behind caching: Write-behind caching batches dataupdates, sending them to thebackend data store at a config-ured interval. This dramaticallyimproves transaction responsetimes as they no longer need todeal with the backend data storein a synchronous fashion. Thisapproach reduces load on thedata store and shields the appli-cation from backend outages. Thegrid will hold the updates inmemory in a fault-tolerant man-ner until the backend comes backon-line.

● JPA loaders: Loaders are neededto read and write data from thedata store when using WebSphereeXtreme Scale as an in-memorycache. Starting with WebSphereeXtreme Scale 6.1.0.3, there aretwo built-in loaders that interactwith JPA providers to map rela-tional data to the eXtreme Scalemaps, the JPALoader andJPAEntityLoader. The JPALoaderis used for caches that store PlainOld Java Objects (POJO’s) andthe JPAEntityLoader is used forcaches that store eXtreme Scaleentities. These loaders reduce theburden on the application programmer.

● HTTP session replication: A servletagent is provided that easilyplugs into an existing applicationfor scalable fault-tolerant sessionmanagement. Session data maybe stored locally on the applica-tion JVM or remotely on the grid.Remote grid offers data replica-tion for fault tolerance. Multipledata center support is availableand replication betweenWebSphere Application Servercells is also supported. There is achoice of synchronous or asyn-chronous replication dependingon how rapidly the cached datachanges offering a trade-offbetween zero data loss and exe-cution efficiency.

● Enhanced XTP capabilities

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Produced in the United States of AmericaJune 2009All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and WebSphereare trademarks or registered trademarks ofInternational Business Machines Corporation inthe United States, other countries, or both. Ifthese and other IBM trademarked terms aremarked on their first occurrence in thisinformation with a trademark symbol (® or ™),these symbols indicate U.S. registered orcommon law trademarks owned by IBM at thetime this information was published. Suchtrademarks may also be registered or commonlaw trademarks in other countries. A current listof IBM trademarks is available on the Web at“Copyright and trademark information” atibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.

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For more information

To learn more about the

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale prod-

uct, please contact your IBM marketing

representative or IBM Business Partner,

or visit the following Web sites:

● Visit WebSphere Extreme Transaction

Processing for Developers to discussvarious topics for developing XTPapplications and learn aboutemerging trends, benefits, chal-lenges and features

● WebSphere eXtreme Scale including anObject Grid demo

● Blog with the eXtreme Scale Chief

Architect, IBM DistinguishedEngineer, Billy Newport, Architectfor eXtreme Scale

● eXtreme Scale wiki on DeveloperWorks● Users Guide to WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Redbook

● Introduction to WebSphere Extreme Scale

with some popular use cases with BillyNewport, IBM DistinguishedEngineer

● Learn the eXtreme Scale conceptsfrom the experts on YouTube

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale at a glance

WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) capabilities that ensure a smarterapplication infrastructure to support your most demanding business-critical applications.

Supported Environments:

● AIX®● HP-UX● Solaris● Windows®● z/OS®

Product Positioning:

● WebSphere eXtreme Scale compliments the WebSphere Application Server family of products providing adistributed caching platform for WebSphere Application Server business applications. WebSphere eXtremeScale also enhances the capabilities of WebSphere stack products.

Complementary Products:

● WebSphere Network Deployment● WebSphere Virtual Enterprise● WebSphere Compute Grid● WebSphere Real Time● WebSphere Commerce