Ibm Websphere Extreme Scale Quick Summary

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

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Today’s dynamic business environments and economic uncertainty mean organizations 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 transacExtreme Transaction Processing

tions for everything from web commerce and RFID processing in dynamic supply chains to real-time financial

Highlights ■

A powerful, scalable, elastic in-

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interactions to on-line social networking Scales elastically at runtime to

memory grid for your business-

thousands of JVMs, limited only

critical applications

by available physical machines, and offers linear, predictable

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Offers broad range of usage

scaling at predictable cost

ful distributed grid

ensure that their critical applications can meet the requirements of rapid increases in demand, can deliver immediate, consistent response, and can scale as necessary.

scenarios spanning from simple, in-process cache to power-

and gaming. Organizations need to

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Lowers the risks of data loss and limit after-hours recovery and reconciliation efforts through automatic replication of data delivering high availability and fault tolerance

The IBM WebSphere® portfolio offers extreme transaction processing (XTP) capabilities that ensure, you have a SMART SOA™-based application infrastructure which can support your most

demanding business-critical applica-

response times. WebSphere eXtreme

tions. WebSphere allows you to over-

Scale is an essential distributed caching

come traditional IT performance

platform from IBM for elastic scalability

limitations to generate the levels of

and the next-generation cloud

global scale, process efficiencies, and

environments.

business intelligence needed for smarter business outcomes, like

WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides

sustainable competitive advantage,

the technology to enhance business

maximized revenues and avoidance of

applications, including web commerce,

potential fines stemming from inconsis-

supply chain, financial, trading and even

tent response and SLA violations.

on-line gaming, to form new, innovative classes of business applications by

The IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale

extending the data-caching concept

product allows business applications to

with advanced features. These applica-

process massive volumes of transac-

tion enhancements can be realized by

tions with extreme efficiency and near

utilizing WebSphere eXtreme Scale in

linear scalability. WebSphere eXtreme

the following flexible scenarios and

Scale is designed to work in heteroge-

configurations:

neous environments across all leading application server platforms and virtualization 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

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Simple Data and Database Cache:

Applications can access data structures to improve performance and throughput using the WebSphere eXtreme Scale configuration as a local cache. Caching the data in memory attacks what is often the largest part of a transaction’s processing time, waiting for the data to arrive. WebSphere eXtreme Scale enhances this traditional datacaching scenario even further by offering fail-over capability.

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Having the data in memory is good. When dealing with large volumes of data, applications can perform even better. A Java™ Virtual Machine (JVM™) can have a local eXtreme Scale grid which sits in front of a remote grid serving as a “near cache” for a subset of the data, allowing a client to leverage a very large remote cache to offload backend processing or to speed access to cached results. The near cache is in the same JVM as the application and provides local, in-process access to data. It contains a subset of all the data in the grid and is checked first when a record is requested. If the record is not in the near cache, then it is retrieved from the grid and put into the near cache. The response time is reduced the next time the same record is accessed. The faster response times for the records you access often leads to faster response time for the user. The near cache is also updated when data writes go to the grid. Applications can use the distributed locking services provided by the remote grid to coordinate access to shared data across clients. Client/Grid with Near Cache:

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Side cache/Java Persistence API (JPA) cache plug-in: When applications need information that is used frequently but does not change often, like a user’s profile, a side cache offers significant performance benefits. WebSphere eXtreme Scale can be used as a side cache to store objects that have been retrieved from the backend. The application checks the side cache first to see if it contains a record. If there’s a cache miss, then the data is retrieved from the backend and inserted into the cache.

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Real-Time Data and Event Mining:

When working with real time data flows, the first challenge is filtering and organizing the data so the applications can use it. A partitioned eXtreme Scale configuration can subscribe to events and apply them to partitioned data thus supporting linear scalability and deterministic latency for these applications. Map/Reduce support: WebSphere eXtreme Scale clients can invoke agents that run against massive amounts of data on multiple nodes in parallel. Clients can then aggregate and further process the results stored in the grid by the nodes.

Chirp on eXtreme Scale at IMPACT 2009

WebSphere eXtreme Scale caches can

Scale offers this and also allows graphs

potentially span thousands of JVMs and

of objects to be easily pushed to the

support extremely large datasets. In

cache. WebSphere eXtreme Scale

addition, WebSphere eXtreme Scale

allows simple Java objects to be anno-

includes efficient new algorithms to

tated and uses a simpler API to trans-

allow in-memory caches to grow elasti-

parently allow these graphs to be

cally as the number of available JVMs

fetched from the grid as well as to push

or physical machines changes.

any changes made by the application back to the grid. This significantly sim-

Traditional distributed cache products

plifies programming compared with the

use Map APIs as their primary pro-

older JCache or Map-based APIs,

gramming model. WebSphere eXtreme

improving productivity of the application developers by allowing them to focus on the core business logic.

The IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale

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product provides a comprehensive

Ability to specify “zones” where data should reside, either within a server system, data center, or geography, and have the system transparently manage data placement to those zones. A zone can be a chassis, a building, or a different geography. Synchronous replicas reside in the same zone as primary replicas with asynchronous replicas residing in different zones. This offers more granularity of shard placement, providing more fault tolerance. This allows your data store to support the availability constraints unique to your business.

elastic persistent store solution for the business applications while offering:

Includes in-memory management capabilities with the capacity to support terabytes of data spread across thousands of servers. This allows your business application to seamlessly scale with the data growth.

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In-Memory management:

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High availability and fault tolerance:

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If a primary server fails, a replica is automatically promoted to be the primary. Multiple replicas can be supported. This can be done asynchronously or synchronously, and is transparent to the application. The result is a business application that is available whenever the client needs it. Fast application performance: Data is stored in memory so applications have extremely fast (millisecond) access to data. Being able to access data in memory means faster applications and less workload for the supporting database servers. Linear scalability: As data or transaction volumes grow, more servers can be added in a seamless fashion to handle the additional data and workload while still ensuring effective application access to data and consistent, predictable response times.

Flexible definition of data location:

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WebSphere eXtreme Scale includes a cache provider for the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache service provides a consistent distributed “drop-in” cache for enterprise applications. This brings a higher quality of service, linear scalability and high availability to bear on a broad variety of business applications utilizing, or interested in utilizing, the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache service with minimal invasive changes.

applications:

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Heterogeneous environment sup-

Supports and executes either in a standard Java EE compliant server environment, or any Java Virtual Machine compliant with Java SE V1.4 or beyond. Provides a common data fabric approach that supports heterogeneous server environments. This means that data store technology is accessible to many of your Java applications.

“Drop-in” cache for enterprise

port:

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Reporting and monitoring:

WebSphere eXtreme Scale includes implementations of metric access adapters to improve integration with IBM Tivoli® Monitoring or Hyperic HQ, enabling comprehensive insight into the operational behavior of business solutions. Ease of use: WebSphere eXtreme Scale handles many of the common retry and exception logic tasks within the grid middleware. The request timeout for clients removes the burden from developers for boiler-plate retry logic for most map interaction operations. Most retry-able conditions are handled automatically, enabling developers to focus on the business logic aspects of application development.

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Enhanced XTP capabilities

— Building multi-tenant applications has been greatly simplified. Map templates allow applications to create new maps on demand, avoiding the need to use application discriminators in the keys or to create extra maps that may never be used. — Implementation of byte array maps reduces the memory footprint of the grid cache, resulting in lower memory costs and better performance. — The indexing supports multiple attributes. This feature can simplify index usage when querying multiple attributes and reduce the overhead of having multiple indexes defined. Query has also been optimized to take advantage of composite indexes. — Operational flexibility includes the ability to snapshot maps which allows applications to easily generate snapshots for reporting purposes, and with replica completion for incomplete replicas based on the last replica checkpoint and synchronous replication. — With support for WebSphere Real Time, the industryleading real-time Java offering, WebSphere eXtreme Scale enables XTP applications to have more consistent and predictable response times.

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Writethrough caching immediately propagates all changes from the in-memory cache to the backend database as part of the transaction. This method results in longer response times but guarantees all changes are persisted to the backend database. This approach also provides synchronization between the cache and backend. This is valuable in situations where the data must be hardened to the backend data store for the transactions to be considered complete. Write-behind caching: Writebehind caching batches data updates, sending them to the backend data store at a configured interval. This dramatically improves transaction response times as they no longer need to deal with the backend data store in a synchronous fashion. This approach reduces load on the data store and shields the application from backend outages. The grid will hold the updates in memory in a fault-tolerant manner until the backend comes back on-line. Write-through caching:

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Loaders are needed to read and write data from the data store when using WebSphere eXtreme Scale as an in-memory cache. Starting with WebSphere eXtreme Scale 6.1.0.3, there are two built-in loaders that interact with JPA providers to map relational data to the eXtreme Scale maps, the JPALoader and JPAEntityLoader. The JPALoader is used for caches that store Plain Old Java Objects (POJO’s) and the JPAEntityLoader is used for caches that store eXtreme Scale entities. These loaders reduce the burden on the application programmer. HTTP session replication: A servlet agent is provided that easily plugs into an existing application for scalable fault-tolerant session management. Session data may be stored locally on the application JVM or remotely on the grid. Remote grid offers data replication for fault tolerance. Multiple data center support is available and replication between WebSphere Application Server cells is also supported. There is a choice of synchronous or asynchronous replication depending on how rapidly the cached data changes offering a trade-off between zero data loss and execution efficiency. JPA loaders:

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

Supported Environments: © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 ● ● ● ● ●

AIX® HP-UX Solaris Windows® z/OS®

IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America June 2009 All Rights Reserved

Product Positioning: ●

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

Complementary Products: ● ● ● ● ●

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

For more information

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To learn more about the

Blog with the eXtreme Scale Chief

IBM Distinguished Engineer, Billy Newport, Architect for eXtreme Scale eXtreme Scale wiki on DeveloperWorks

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Users Guide to WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Other product, company or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

Architect,

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale product, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner,

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or visit the following Web sites:

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Redbook ●

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Visit WebSphere Extreme Transaction Processing for Developers to discuss various topics for developing XTP applications and learn about emerging trends, benefits, challenges and features WebSphere eXtreme Scale including an Object Grid demo

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IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.

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Introduction to WebSphere Extreme Scale

with Billy Newport, IBM Distinguished Engineer Learn the eXtreme Scale concepts from the experts on YouTube with some popular use cases

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