J2EE/SOA OPTIMIZATION
Is it really an SOA if it doesn't have a service-oriented infrastructure?
The Challenge:
The SOA and Web Services Dilemma
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) dramatically increases application development productivity, one of the reasons why SOA is being widely adopted within large enterprise IT environments. Gartner states that by 2010, at least 65% of large organizations will have more than 35% of their application portfolios SOA-based*.
But translating increased application development productivity into profits requires efficient application management. Managing applications efficiently in an SOA environment is a complex task because SOA presents so many variables that affect application performance. One of these variables is the load placed on a component by the applications that share it.
Most SOA application services are implemented in Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). For these applications your IT group must acquire and reserve sufficient server capacity to handle peak loads. That means these servers are often dedicated to specific applications, creating tightly coupled J2EE application/server silos.
As is, these J2EE application/server silos do not lend themselves to server consolidation. By dedicating hardware for peak loads, your IT department can expect to see up to 90 percent of your Java application resources sitting idle most of the time. Sound familiar? This problem is compounded by the high operational expense of manually keeping these applications and servers running optimally.
Given this typical scenario, existing J2EE implementations— with applications tightly coupled to servers— end up limiting the cost savings and server utilization benefits that could otherwise be achieved by server consolidation. There has to be another way.
The Cassatt Solution:
Managing SOA with a Real-Time, Automated Infrastructure
Service level expectations are increasing and meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is critical to business continuity. Data center administrators must control application performance cost-effectively, and avoid expensive over-provisioning. To do this, they need a management tool that looks at applications and resources intelligently and allocates resources in an optimized way.
Cassatt Active Response manages SOA by providing:
- Capacity on Demand. This eliminates the need for traditional capacity planning by allowing for efficient scaling-in and scaling-out of both physical and virtualized applications as needed;
- Dynamic Provisioning. Cassatt Active Response dynamically provisions application servers and J2EE services, which increases server utilization while maintaining quality of service;
- Increased Control. Cassatt Active Response enables fine-grained control of application servers. Failed hardware is automatically replaced by new application servers which are brought into service in minutes.
Using Cassatt Active Response, administrators leverage SLAs for each composite application with goal-driven policies that are based on business priorities. These policies add intelligence to the SLA that not only establishes performance thresholds, but assigns priorities to applications based on business factors.
Cassatt Cassatt Active Response, coupled with an application server feature pack, brings the benefits of virtualization to your Java-based SOA applications. The Cassatt software creates a virtual pool of resources- hardware, operating systems, and middleware- that decouples J2EE applications from their servers. The consolidated pool of resources is shared and free for use by all J2EE applications.
The software monitors the internal status of each J2EE application you run. If your monitored and defined thresholds are breached, the Cassatt Active Response automation software initiates corrective action to ensure that your business service level agreements are being met. All this can be done at runtime and without human intervention.
Key benefits of Cassatt Active Response include:
- Applications are automatically assigned additional computing resources when performance falls below your user-defined goals
- Failed hardware is automatically replaced and new application servers are brought into service in minutes
- Resources for hundreds of J2EE applications can be drawn from a single shared pool of servers- dramatically improving your server utilization
- Application provisioning time can be significantly shortened by eliminating the need to acquire dedicated hardware for each new application
The Business Value:
Better Responsiveness and Server Utilization.
Decreased Capital and Operational Costs.
By running J2EE / SOA services under Cassatt Active Response, your IT group can:
- Offer better, faster, more cost-effective, and reliable service levels
- Improve responsiveness by sharing resources to meet demand
- Reduce operational costs via data center automation
- Reduce capital costs via server consolidation
The Cassatt Active Response automation software solution enables your IT group to keep capital expenditures to a minimum and drastically reduce operational costs, while driving up utilization of your existing hardware and software.
Go to Cassatt Active Response product page for more details.
* Gartner, "Service-Oriented Architecture Craves Governance", 20 January 2006.
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