IBM eX5 Technology and WebSphere Produce High-Performance Websites

The world is becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent every day. IBM® Smarter Commerce™ enables new business processes that help companies to buy, market, sell, and service their products and services. IBM Smarter Cities® are combining data from multiple systems to improve education, transportation, power management, and the delivery of social services. IBM Smarter Healthcare® turns data into clinical and business insights, and it instruments processes with those insights in real time for point-of-care decisions and productivity. For these systems to be useful, they must be accessible. Today, accessibility generally means availability on the web by using web-facing applications.

Application servers are the middleware that help enterprises to make their applications accessible on the Internet. However, application servers do much more than make applications available; they also do these tasks:

• Extend the capabilities of the operating system in managing applications.
  
• Optimize the system resources used by web-facing applications.
  
• Manage the connections between web-facing applications and external resources, such as databases, networks, and other applications.
  
• Provide quality-of-service features, such as availability, security, management, performance, and scalability to web-facing applications.
  

Clearly, a strong application server is absolutely essential for the smooth operation of your enterprise web-facing applications.

IBM provides servers and systems that enhance accessibility in small-, medium-, and enterprise-level businesses. The IBM Strategy and Technology Lab (STL) conducted studies with IBM WebSphere® and eX5 products to determine the improvements these products can offer.

First, we studied WebSphere Application Server, which provides an impressive combination of function and performance. The success of WebSphere Application Server in the marketplace is evidenced by the following statistics collected by IBM:

• More than 19,000 WebSphere Application Server customers exist, and more than 300 IBM products include WebSphere Application Server as a key enabling component.
  
• WebSphere is used in 90% of the 100 largest companies in the world.
  
• More than 4,330 IBM Business Partner applications are built on WebSphere Application Server and are listed in the IBM Global Solutions Directory.
  
• More than 80,000 WebSphere family feature packs have been downloaded to extend WebSphere systems.
  
• More than 9,000 independent software vendors write applications to run on WebSphere.
  

Second, we studied MAX5, a memory expansion unit for eX5 processors, which improves performance. Application consolidation is improved with MAX5, and so it is useful in virtual environments.

Third, we studied WebSphere eXtreme Scale, a product designed to improve application performance through the use of a scalable data grid for storing objects in computer memory rather than disks. This grid increases application performance by reducing the latency in accessing data.

This IBM Redpaper™ publication describes the studies done by the STL and describes the results with a focus on the accessibility needs of your business.

This publication is directed to IT professionals and decision-makers, such as CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, IBM clients, IBM Business Partners, information architects, business intelligence administrators, and database administrators.

Introduction to web-facing applications and accessibility
WebSphere Application Server and eX5 have the power to support web-facing applications
Consolidating applications with WebSphere on eX5
WebSphere eXtreme Scale improves eX5 performance
WebSphere eXtreme Scale studies
Summary

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• 4-Socket Rack Servers
• IBM Alliance
• Mission Critical Servers