2 WebSphere eXtreme Scale Best Practices for Operation and Management
1.1 Benefits of using WebSphere eXtreme Scale
Today’s dynamic business environment and economic uncertainty mean organizations must
work smarter to remain competitive and to respond to changing customer demands. The key
to working smarter is business agility and cost optimization. Organizations need to ensure
that crucial applications can meet the requirements of rapid increases in demand, can deliver
immediate and consistent responses, and can scale as necessary. There is also a need for
enhanced application performance to keep pace with rising customer expectations regarding
application response time while also managing the costs of the infrastructure.
Many challenges in meeting these demands center around data access. A standard three-tier
application will typically present the following challenges:
Keeping system response time low while user load increases
Dealing with a high database load that causes slow data access
Scaling the current infrastructure as the data volume grows
Dealing with a volume of data that is so large that it cannot be stored in a single, physical
system
Maintaining the state in memory and replicating that state across multiple systems in
various data centers in case of failover
The solution to these challenges can be found with WebSphere eXtreme Scale. WebSphere
eXtreme Scale is an elastic, scalable, in-memory data grid. It allows business applications to
process billions of transactions per day with efficiency and near-linear scalability. The data
grid dynamically caches, partitions, replicates, and manages application data and business
logic across multiple servers and virtualization environments. With WebSphere eXtreme
Scale, you can also get qualities of service, such as transactional integrity, high availability,
and predictable response time.
1.2 Adoption of WebSphere eXtreme Scale
WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides a data grid to store data. How you access that grid, and
the type of data that you store in it can vary depending on the application. A detailed systems
and design analysis is required to determine if, when, and how you use WebSphere eXtreme
Scale. This analysis is an important exercise for devising a decision tree road map for
adoption of any new technology.