admin - TxMQ Solutions

IBM Worklight V6.0, IBM Mobile Applications Platform Pattern V6.0, and IBM Mobile Foundation V6.0

Posted on June 26, 2013 | by admin

IBM® Worklight® and IBM Mobile Foundation are open standards-based mobile application foundations, which enable accelerated delivery of innovative mobile solutions. As elements of IBM MobileFirst, they help you build rich, cross-platform applications using standard technology, and connect mobile applications to a variety of enterprise back-end systems and cloud systems.
IBM Worklight V6.0 delivers an open, comprehensive, and advanced mobile application platform for smartphones and tablets, offering:

Mobile application development and delivery
Complete end-to-end mobile device management
Advanced connectivity to back-end systems and cloud-based services that is optimized for mobile devices
Advanced application management for updates push and version control

IBM Mobile Foundation V6.0 is a member of the IBM MobileFirst family of products that include IBM Worklight V6.0, IBM Mobile Application Platform pattern V6.0, IBM EndPoint Manager for mobile device management, and IBM WebSphere® Cast Iron® for connectivity. Together, these products help organizations of all iszes extend their business by providing copabilities to efficiently implement, connect, secure, and mangage HTML5, hybrid and native mobile applications.
IBM Worklight helps you by:

Using standard technology, such as HTML5, the native client platform software development kits (SDKs), and integration with the growing ecosystem of third-party tools, libraries, and frameworks
Connecting mobile applications to back-end systems and cloud services through mobile-optimized middleware
Enabling you to manage a portfolio of applications and the lifecycle of their content from one centralized administration console
Helping you secure mobile applications through numerous protection mechanisms, such as encrypted storage, online and offline authentication

Enhancements in IBM Worklight V6.0 Include:

Automated functional testing for accelerated delivery cycles of native and hybrid, cross-platform mobile applications
New advanced IT analytics for application usage insight, triggering of actions based on analytics events, and location-based services such as geo-fencing
Improved application development and testing abilities to record and run tests of mobile applications on devices and emulators
Expanded mobile operating system support, including support for new levels of iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows 8 and RT, and Windows Phone 8 in addition to third-party software support updates for JQuery Mobile and Dojo Mobile
Easier, more guided, hybrid application development, with tools and building blocks such as improved Dojo Mobile setup and screen templates
Improved application startup performance

IBM Worklight V6.0
IBM Worklight is designed to provide an open mobile application platform for developing, deploying, and managing mobile applications on an open extensible platform. Enterprises can deliver mobile content that takes advantage of existing enterprise security, scalability, management solutions, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) service investments.
Worklight is based on open standards, which may help you protect your mobile investment, reduce development costs, and avoid technology lock-ins. Worklight delivers a range of application development and management capabilities to support a wide variety of mobile devices and mobile application types, while taking advantage of existing technologies, skills, and investments.
IBM Worklight V6.0 provides five main capabilities:

A comprehensive, cross-platform, standards-based extensible environment that maximizes code reuse and per-device optimization.
Includes a rich, drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG development environment
Helps to simplify the development of mobile web, hybrid, and native applications across multiple mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone

Mobile-optimized middleware that provides a services layer to support back-end integration, version management, security, and unified push notification mechanisms.
Supports Mobile Application Management (MAM) and mobile authenticity check, mobile usage statistics, and reports
Facilitates authentication framework integration for single sing-on (SSO)

Extensible libraries and client API’s that expose and interface with native device capabilities, such as the camera, accelerometer, and contact lists, using standard web skills.
Provide on-device, synchronized, and encrypted storage facilities for storing sensitive data on the device

Administrators can remotely disable applications based on predetermined rules of application version and mobile device
Directs users to a new version of the application, if necessary
Can deploy new versions of an application’s web code and automatically push the versions to users
Administrators can monitor the push notification framework and enable or disable notifications to specific applications
Administrators can access reports describing application adoption and usage, or integrate with the enterprise business intelligence (BI) system to perform custom analytics on mobile usage data

Can function as an enterprise application store by providing a place to deploy mobile applications across platforms with appropriate access control and role based security
If you want to deploy mobile applications to the IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices, the process of moving mobile applications from development with IBM Worklight to production deployment with IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices is simplified

The following products integrate well with IBM Worklight and IBM Mobile Foundation solutions to deliver unified front-end and back-end mobile development:

Rational® IDE V8.5.1 products
- Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software
- Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software
- Rational Developer for System z
- Rational Developer for Power® System Software

The following products provide specific support for IBM Worklight and IBM Mobile Foundation, and provide a more robust solution:

IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution
- Rational Requirements Composer
- Rational Team Concert
- Rational Quality Manager
- IBM Worklight
- IBM WebSphere Portal

Prerequisites are mobile operating systems that include iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows RT, and Windows Phone and IBM PureApplication™ System V1.0 for IBM Mobile Application Platform Pattern. In addition to this, the program will run on AIX®, Linux™, Mac OS, and Windows operating systems.
The planned available date for the media packs is July 19, 2013 and the electronic delivery packages have been available since June 14, 2013.
IBM Worklight V6.0, together with the additional products from IBM’s MobileFirst initiative, enables you to address the entire lifecycle of your mobile initiative.
For more information on Worklight V6.0 or TxMQ IT Solutions and Staffing please contact Miles Roty, Senior Account Manager? [email protected] 716-636-0070 ext 228

IBM® MessageSight: The appliance for Mobile Messaging and M2M

Posted on June 14, 2013 | by admin

On April 23, 2013 IBM® announced MessageSight that delivers massive scale communication within and beyond the enterprise.
As many people have come to realize, the Internet is no longer just for web browsing. Consumers and application owners expect near, real-time interactions between mobile phones, sensors, machines and applications.
IBM MessageSight is a messaging platform that delivers the performance, scalability, and value organizations required to meet the demands of the hyper-connected world. IBM MessageSight allows organizations to expand their applications beyond the data to provide a truly interactive experience.

IBM MessageSight delivers:

High-performance, reliable and scalable messaging
Security
Simple deployment
Extension of existing enterprise messaging
Developer friendly design

With IBM MessageSight you can sit at the edge of your enterprise and can extend your existing messaging infrastructure or use MessageSight as a standalone.

IBM MessageSight allows organizations to implement a variety of use cases:

Connected vehicles
Event-driven sensor networks
Interactive mobile applications including notifications
WebSocket HTML5-based web applications
Near, real-time date collection for Big Data analytics
Scalable alerting and notification systems
High-scale asynchronous publish and subscribe for service-oriented architectures

IBM MessageSight Features:

One appliance can handle:

1M Concurrent Connection

13M non-persistent msg/sec

400K persistent msg/sec
Predictable latency in the microseconds under load

MessageSight has efficient MQTT messaging protocol that is faster, requires less bandwidth and less battery than traditional https. In addition to this, it’s event oriented paradigm allows for better customer experience. It has support for JavaScript, C and Java APIs and apps can be HTML5 web apps, native or hybrid. MessageSight also integrates easily with IBM Worklight.

Hardened appliance form factor ensure that there is secure firmware (signed and encrypted by IBM) and no user-visible, general purpose OS. There are also fine-grained messaging policies with SSL/TLS (including FIPS 140-2), authentication and deny-based access control. MessageSight is highly available (without shared resources) and there are various options for Quality of Service including Assured delivery.

Simple yet powerful API’s consistent across multiple platforms

Simple paradigm: connect, subscribe, publish
Promotes loosely coupled and scalable applications

Protocols:

Active development community on developer Works
Could-based demo systems for rapid prototyping

MessageSight is compatible with a variety of environments such as; JMS support for Java Standard Edition (JSE) environments, WebSockets support for Rich Internet Applications and MQTT protocol with many open source clients. There is built-in connectivity with WebSphere MQ and one appliance can connect to multiple WebSphere MQ queue managers. Lastly there is IBM Integration Bus support through the JMS nodes.

MessageSight’s goal is to be up and running within 30 minutes. They use task oriented UI guides to administrate through the first steps and implement simple and scalable management through policies.

Implementing the IBM MessageSight allows your business to scale to the demands of the mobile and m2m use cases. It easily extends your existing messaging infrastructure across the Internet and it is easy to develop applications with simple programming interfaces.
IBM MessageSight is the best way to implement the event driven architecture at the edge of the network. It delivers unprecedented level of scale, it is secrue and reliable and yet remains simple to use.

High-level architecture of the demo:

The all-new IBM MessageSight appliance is a secure, easy-to-deploy messaging server that is optimized to address the massive scale requirements of the machine to machine and mobile use cases. It can handle a million connections, and millions of messages per second. MessageSight is designed to sit at the edge of the enterprise and can extend your existing messaging infrastructure or be used as a standalone. MessageSight extends and complements the existing IBM Connectivity and Integration portfolio.

Appliance Connectivity:

For more information on MessageSight or TxMQ IT Solutions and Staffing please contact Miles Roty, Senior Account Manager
[email protected] 716-636-0070 ext 228

Why you should migrate to WAS v8.x

Posted on June 6, 2013 | by admin

As of the end of September 2013 IBM® will no longer offer support on WebSphere® Application Server 6.1. This means that you have two options; lose extended support on your WebSphere Application Server or migrate to WAS v8.x.
With WAS v8.x you will experience a number of upgrades along with additions to the application. You won’t just get an updated version of the application, you will also keep your costs down by avoiding support extensions and running your applications on an unsupported environment.
Not only does WAS 8.x have significant performance, productivity and security features, but it also allows you to take advantage of the additional 7 years of development and resulting capabilities driven into WAS since v6.1 was released. In addition, WAS v8.x allows you to take advantage of virtualization, web, mobile and cloud capabilities.
WAS v8.x has the highest performing foundation (Application Server) for dynamic, interconnected business processes and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). You will also have the ability to manage large topologies asynchronously to standalone app servers or entire cells (WAS ND Job Manager and new WAS ND Liberty Collective Cluster Controller in v8.5.5).
There is not defined path that fits all migrations. Your decision to migrate should be based on three factors. One being that the versions involved in the customer migration scenario, moving from v6.1 to v8.5 would be different than v6.1 to v7.0. Two, the amount of change introduced in and between these versions. Moving from WAS v6.1 to v8.5 involves changes introduced by v7.0, v8.0 and v.8.5. And lastly, dependencies on third-party frameworks and libraries. Some frameworks/libraries are JRE-specific or unsupported on newer JREs, some libraries are now IN the JRE and can cause class collisions (Axis2/JAX-WS).
The best part about all of this is that TxMQ can help with your migration. TxMQ has experience with migrations (AIX, Linux, Windows, zOS), with systems evaluations and HealthChecks available too.
If you aren’t ready to switch just yet TxMQ can help with that too. We offer a remote support solution with ticketed handling of out of support WAS v6.1 issues by certified WAS technical Experts. This includes issue analysis, diagnosis, resolutions communication, infrastructure support and supplements internal teams with proactive maintenance services, consulting, training and problem resolution.
For more information please contact Miles Roty [email protected].

zEnterprise vs Intel Server Farms

Posted on June 5, 2013 | by admin

I’m reposting an interesting blog that was shared with us from a Partner organization. Please read and enjoy!
How many Intel x86 servers do you need to match the performance of a zEnterprise and at what cost for a given workload? That is the central question every IT manager has to answer.
It is a question that deserves some thought and analysis. Yet often IT managers jump to their decision based on series of gut assumptions that on close analysis are wrong. And the resulting decision more often than not is for the Intel server although an honest assessment of the data in many instances should point the other way. DancingDinosaur has periodically looks at comparative assessments done by IBM. You can find a previous one, lessons from Eagle studies, here.
The first assumption is that the Intel server is cheaper. But is it? IBM benchmarked a database workload on SQL Server running on Intel x86 and compared it to DB2 on z/OS. To support 23,000 users, the Intel system required 128 database cores on four HP servers. The hardware cost $0.34 million and the software cost $1.64 million for a 3-year TCA of $1.98 million. The DB2 system required just 5 cores at a hardware/software combined 3-year TCA of $1.4 million
What should have killed the Intel deal was the software cost, which has to be licensed based on the number of cores. Sure, the commodity hardware was cheap, but the cost of the database licensing drove up the Intel cost. Do IT managers wonder why they need so many Intel cores to support the same number of users they can support with far fewer z cores? Obviously many don’t.
Another area many IT managers overlook is I/O performance and its associated costs. This becomes particularly important as an organization deploys virtual machines. Increasing the I/O demand on an Intel system uses more of the x86 core for I/O processing, effectively reducing the number of virtual machines that can be deployed per server and raising hardware costs.
The zEnterprise handles I/O differently. It provides 4-16 dedicated system assist processors for the offloading of I/O requests and an I/O subsystem bus speed of 8 GBps.
The z also does well with z/VM for Linux guest workloads. In this case IBM tested three OLTP database production workloads (4 server nodes per cluster), each supporting 6,000 trans/sec, Oracle Enterprise Edition, and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) running on 12 HP DL580 servers (192 cores). This was compared to three Oracle RAC clusters of 4 nodes per cluster with each node as a Linux guest under z/VM . The zEC12 had 27 IFLs. Here the Oracle HP system cost $13.2 million, about twice as much as on the zEC12, $5.7 million. Again, the biggest cost savings came from the need for fewer Oracle licenses due to fewer cores.
The z also does beats Intel servers when running mixed high- and low- priority workloads on the same box. In one example, IBM compared high priority online banking transaction workloads with low priority discretionary workloads. The workloads running across 3 Intel servers with 40 cores each (120 cores total) cost $13.7 million compared to z/VM on an zEC12 running 32 IFLs, which cost $5.77 million (58% less).
Another comparison demonstrates that core proliferation between Intel and the z is the killer. One large workload test required sixteen 32-way HP Superdome App. Production/Dev/ Test servers and eight 48-way HP Superdome DB Production/Dev/Test for a total of 896 cores. The 5-year TCA came to $180 million. The comparable workload running on a zEC12 41-way production/dev/test system used 41 general purpose processors (38,270 MIPS) with a 5-year TCA of $111 million.
When you look at the things a z can do to keep concurrent operations running that Intel cannot you’d hope non-mainframe IT managers might start to worry. For example, the z handles core sparing transparently; Intel must bring the server down. The z handles microcode updates while running; Intel can update OS-level drivers but not firmware drivers. Similarly, the z handles memory and bus adapter replacements while running; Intel servers must be brought down to replace either.
Not sure what it will take for the current generation of IT managers to look beyond Intel. Maybe a new business class version of the zEC12 at a stunningly low price. You tell me.
You can see the original posting here.

IBM WebSphere MQ Advanced is a Messaging Leader

Posted on May 13, 2013 | by admin

IBM Messaging is the backbone for all IBM integration. IBM messaging is developed to work with enterprise, mobile and managed file transfer environments.
Enterprise Messaging

Provides data and transactional integrity as part of data movement
Communications that handle interruptions seamlessly
Simpler business applications through a consistent interface
Flexibility to distribute data in multiple ways
Works with many applications and programming languages
Ideal for moving batch systems to real-time

Mobile Messaging

Enables mobile apps to easily interact with existing applications and services
Messaging that is optimized for needs of HTML 5apps and mobile networks
Reduces network load and increases responsiveness

Managed File Transfer

Leverages messaging infrastructure for SOA-based MFT
Provides secure, reliable transfer of business data contained in files
Provides end-to-end visibility and audit

IBM Messaging provides a universal messaging solution for all your enterprise, mobile and managed file transfer needs.
Customers have seen up to a 9 times increase in transactional capacity and 2/3 reduction in round-trip order time.
What Capabilities Does Your Business Need?
Messaging maps to a variety of customer needs. Refer to the chart below to outline which messaging capability most closely relates to your needs.

Capability	Need
Enterprise Messaging	Need to reliably transport business critical data Need to ensure sensitive information and intellectual property is secure Shorten time to recover/restore after application or network failure Reduce expense of supporting & improving homegrown messaging Need to standardize on an integration backbone that connects your applications reliably and securely
Mobile Messaging	Need robust, multi-platform, low bandwidth solution for getting mobile data from the edge into your enterprise at a lower price Need a streamlined, lightweight messaging to use less power on mobile devices while enabling constant communication. Need live insight into telemetry data from your remote sensors
Managed File Transfer	Need to avoid negative business impact when files aren’t properly transferred, such as wasted time and energy trying to figure out what happened, lost data, manual processes to restore everything Need to be able to show in an audit where transferred files and documents came from and went Need to ensure security of file transfers

WebSphere MQ Advanced
Are you wondering what makes WebSphere MQ Advanced so unique?

Widest coverage of client and server platforms
- 87 different combinations of OS & hardware
Wide selection of programing languages and APIs
- Java, JMS, Javascript, C/C++, C#, .NET, Visual Basin, PHP, Ruby, Python, F#. PL/I, Cobol, RPG
High performance
- Thousands of transactional credit card updates per second
Reliability
- Works over satellite, DSL, fiber, cellular, etc
- Built in transaction manager, works over slow connections, provides reliable data transfer and is proven to work in mission critical environments
Widespread and Mature
- 93% of the world’s banks conduct their business using WebSphere MQ
- Proven and mature with tens of thousands in production and 10 years as MOM leader
- TxMQ has skilled developers and administrators ready available to assist with any MQ project

Businesses today need reliability, security and performance and WebSphere MQ Advanced gives you control over all aspects of your IT infrastructure. You will gain visibility to all your data, along with the success and failure of your connectivity to allow you to do more with your business.
Here’s a view of the WebSphere MQ family of offerings.

For more information about TxMQ’s MQ solutions and services, please contact Miles Roty, [email protected] or call him at 716-636-0070 (228).

TxMQ completes WebSphere MQ Environment Review

Posted on May 6, 2013 | by admin

TxMQ has an awesome HealthCheck service. We look at it as an inspection of sorts. Just as you would take your car in for an inspection yearly, whether you’re hearing a clunking sound or not, we believe you should do the same thing with your systems and environment in your IT department.
Likely, your IT infrastructure is the backbone of your company. All important business functions tie back to your IT department and configuration. If it shuts down, how much money will your company lose per minute? How about per second? Have you ever evaluated that?
So, like getting your brakes checked on your car before they fail and you get into an accident, we think it’s a great idea to get your systems checked before they fail.
Recently, a large regional bank commissioned TxMQ consultants to come in and do just that. They requested from us an IBM® “WebSphere® MQ report card” of sorts of how their MQ applications were running compared to other organization of like size and functionality.
TxMQ has a great subject matter expert with extensive IBM® MQ experience who was able to go onsite at the bank and work interactively with members of the department to dig into their daily activities and diagnose weaknesses and strengths. This is the second such HealthCheck that TxMQ has completed for this bank, the prior being a CICS HealthCheck.
To see the results of the HealthCheck, please click here. If you’re interested in proactively heading off potential issues within your IT infrastructure, please contact Miles Roty at TxMQ today, [email protected]or call (415) 535-3960.
In most cases, a thorough HealthCheck is a 1-2 week engagement and will not interfere with your daily tasks. Each system HealthCheck is completely customizable based on your environment and we have a team of experts who can complete the task no matter how heterogeneous the applications are that your company is running.

Operating Environments for IBM Integration Bus V9

Posted on May 3, 2013 | by admin

Before planning your implementation of IBM Integration Bus V9, formerly known as WebSphere Message Broker, take a look at the operating environment requirements. If you need help updating your operating system or assessing your environment pre-implementation, contact Miles Roty, Senior Account Manager at TxMQ ([email protected]) to assist you.

Specified operating environment

Hardware requirements – IBM Integration Bus V9.0

IBM AIX
64-bit IBM Power® systems only, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.
Any hardware capable of running other trademarked AIX systems from IBM or other vendors that have passed a set of certification tests for compliance with the IBM AIX application binary and programming interfaces.
HP-UX on Itanium™
Itanium systems: Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running the specified operating system, all the corresponding supporting software shown below, and any associated applications unmodified.
Linux on IBM Power
64-bit IBM Power processor-based systems only, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.
Linux on x86
x86 technology-compatible PC hardware, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.
Linux on x86-64
AMD64 and EM64T technology-compatible PC hardware, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.
Linux on System z®
Any server capable of running one of the Linux for System z releases listed in the software requirements topic below.
Solaris x86-64
AMD64, EM64T, and compatible processors: Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running the specified operating system, all the corresponding supporting software shown below, and any associated applications unmodified.
Solaris SPARC
Sun Microsystems SPARC processor machines.
Microsoft Windows™
Windows x86 technology-compatible PC hardware, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX , V9.0

Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running PowerVM® , IBM AIX , IBM Integration Bus V9.0, and all corresponding supporting software
IBM Workload Deployer, with minimum firmware level V3.1

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for x86, V9.0

Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, IBM Integration Bus V9.0, and all corresponding supporting software
IBM Workload Deployer, with minimum firmware level V3.1

Software requirements IBM Integration Bus V9.0

IBM AIX

IBM AIX 6.1 (Technology Level 5)
IBM AIX 7.1
WebSphere MQ V7.5

HP-UX on Itanium

HP-UX 11i V3 (plus PHCO_38048, PHSS 42980, and PHSS 41496) for Itanium
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on IBM Power

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on x86

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
Ubuntu 12.04
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on x86-64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
Ubuntu 12.04
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on System z

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Solaris on SPARC

Solaris 10
Solaris 11
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Solaris on x86-64

Solaris 10
Solaris 11
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Microsoft Windows x86

Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise (32bit and 64bit) Edition
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition
Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate (32bit and 64bit) Edition
Windows 8 Basic, Professional and Enterprise Editions
Windows 2012, Standard Edition
WebSphere MQ V7.5

Microsoft Windows x86-64

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition
Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate Edition
Windows 8 Basic, Professional and Enterprise Editions
Windows 2012, Standard Edition
WebSphere MQ V7.5

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX , V9.0
PowerVM must be installed on the system targeted for deployment of IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition V9.0 for IBM AIX .
The IBM AIX V6.1 operating system is included in IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition IBM AIX , V9.0. However, clients must purchase the license for IBM AIX separately as part of their Power System hardware and PowerVM setup. All other required software is provided with IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX , V9.0.
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for x86, V9.0
VMware ESX must be installed on the system targeted for deployment of IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux . All other required software is provided with IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition V9.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux .

IBM WAS 6.1 End of Support

Posted on May 2, 2013 | by admin

Are you still running IBM WebSphere® Application Server V6.1? It’s end of support date through IBM is September 30, 2013. That’s just a couple of months away, so it’s time to start thinking about either upgrading to a newer version or evaluating options for extended support.

WebSphere Application Server V8 Migration

It’s time to upgrade WAS 6.1! With the end of support quickly approaching, learn what new features WAS V8 has to offer. This webinar will provide the following information:

Why now is the best time to upgrade
Explain the upgrade process (best practices, pre-requisites, known migration issues)
How TxMQ can help
Options for staying on WAS 6.1

If you’re looking for more information on WebSphere Application Server V8, TxMQ’s subject matter experts can assist with your decision to upgrade or purchase extended support. Each environment is different and depending on your needs, we can develop a customized solution that will leave you feeling secure with your application no matter what you decide to do.
Contact Miles Roty, (415) 535-3960 or [email protected] to consult with a subject matter expert and plan an upgrade strategy today. Don’t get caught without WAS V6.1 support.
TxMQ is an IBM Premier Business Partner and we can help you either upgrade or create a support package as soon as you’d like. Contact us today!

Better Business Insight From IBM Integration Bus V9.0

Posted on May 1, 2013 | by admin

The announcement of IBM® Integration Bus V9.0, previously known as IBM WebSphere® Message Broker, delivers enhancement that can be used across IT environments. Read more on the newest improvements.
Apply business insight to make near-real-time decisions to influence processing flow
Many organizations exploit business rules to improve the quality of transaction- and process-related decisions that are made repeatedly, determining the appropriate course of action for each customer, partner, and internal interaction. When business rules are combined with an integration solution, such decisions are able to influence data as it is being processed in near-real-time, helping to achieve an optimal business outcome.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides built-in capabilities to invoke rules during processing in order to make intelligent routing, validation, and transformation decisions:

Integration developers can get started quickly and easily using simple rules created using intuitive editors within the IBM Integration Bus tooling. Existing or more powerful rules may also be imported from IBM Operational Decision Manager tooling.
Rules are packaged and deployed alongside the integration logic and executed in the same runtime container, minimizing the overhead associated with rule invocation.
Business users have visibility to rules and the ability to govern and change the business logic without requiring rework or redeployment of the integration logic.
IBM Decision Center may be used to manage rules running within IBM Integration Bus as part of a broader Decision Manager solution.

Existing clients transitioning to the built-in rules support from the “IAM9: WebSphere Decision Service Node” SupportPac will benefit from improvements in usability, installability, and deployment.
Rapidly create integration services to meet the needs of process designers
Business process management (BPM) enables organizations to automate, manage, measure, and continuously improve the processes that drive their business. For a given process, this involves choreographing a series of steps that may include human tasks, business rules, and integration services that trigger requests to underlying applications and systems.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 simplifies and accelerates the creation of integration services in support of a BPM solution:

A prebuilt development pattern allows integration developers to rapidly build a new integration service to the exact specification supplied by a process designer. Alternatively, existing integration logic can be easily encapsulated as an integration service for reuse by BPM.
IBM BPM tooling allows process designers to discover an integration service implementation, select from the available operations, automatically map the input and output elements, and perform testing from within the BPM development environment.

Manage integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages
The scope of integration solutions is broadening to extend beyond enterprise boundaries, enabling an explosion of new endpoints (such as mobile applications, cloud applications, and sensors) to have access to enterprise applications and services. This enables a broad spectrum of new opportunities from increasing productivity and responsiveness to deeper customer engagement and loyalty. With these opportunities come the challenges of maintaining availability of business-critical systems in the face of increasing demand or spikes in activity, and effectively managing resources to reflect workload priorities.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides new capabilities that allow operational awareness and control over processing traffic:

A policy-based approach to controlling the processing rate for integration flows. Policies are defined at design time and can be updated operationally.
Individual policies that define thresholds (in messages per second) along with actions to be triggered in order to maintain a desired processing rate. For example, the breaching of a threshold can be configured to trigger subsequent workload to be delayed or rejected in order to protect downstream systems.
The ability to send a notification to operational personnel as a threshold is breached.

Include application-to-application integration in centralized business activities
Application developers are increasingly required to connect applications they create with existing applications to deliver a new composite solution. To assist with this, they need a lightweight integration framework that allows them to quickly and easily enable applications for connectivity and configure common tasks without the need for deep integration skills.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 and IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.5.5 deliver new capabilities and productivity aids that provide a simple way for an application developer to compose applications. Once in place, integration between applications can be instrumented, and events flowed to IBM Integration Bus for inclusion in centralized monitoring, audit, or analytics activities:

Simple connectivity tasks for application developers (such as service versioning) are supported by drag-and-drop graphical data mapping and pre-built developer patterns. This enables applications to connect to each other, as well as to external standard interfaces such as XML, REST, JSON, and web services.
Integration logic developed in the Application Server environment can emit events that can be captured by IBM Integration Bus. This data can then be flowed to business activity monitoring (BAM) solutions, stored in a system of record for audit purposes, or sent to a data warehouse for processing by business analytics engines.

Improve elasticity and response times by exploiting flexible caching capabilities
Caching is a fundamental technology that facilitates the building of scalable infrastructure to support growth in the demand for services. For an integration solution, a distributed cache provides a repository for data reuse and sharing across the network. This creates an elastic processing network able to respond to a request from any available node, and minimizes the amount of data retrieved from back-end systems.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 includes an embedded IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale global cache, along with new options to connect securely to an external cache:

Out-of-the-box capabilities to use embedded cache to store state for integrations and maintain a predictable response time even as the number of clients increases.
Support for connecting securely over SSL to an external cache such as IBM WebSphere DataPower® XC10, enabling a single cache to be shared by multiple products.

Monitor and visualize performance statistics in real time
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides powerful new tools to graphically view operational performance statistics. This provides operational personnel with access to:

Highly configurable views of integration throughput rates in a line chart or tabular form.
The facility to drill down to an appropriate level of detail, scoping statistics to an execution group, a thread, or even an individual node.
Foundational BAM capabilities such as the ability to assign and view the business context of particular data, for example its value.

Exploit new patterns to rapidly integrate Microsoft applications
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 delivers additional productivity aids enabling Microsoft applications to be rapidly integrated as part of a heterogeneous integration solution. Prebuilt patterns for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allow transformation and synchronization of client data with another CRM application. This facilitates sharing of the state of business relationships and transactions consistently across an organization, while preserving data quality:

A prebuilt pattern assists with the integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a SAP system. Updates to customer data from create, read, update, and delete operations via a SAP BAPI can be easily reflected in a matching Dynamics CRM Account Entity.
A second prebuilt pattern builds upon the first by allowing Microsoft Dynamics CRM application to be updated using a variety of other mechanisms, including WebSphere MQ messages, HTTP, or flat files.

Flexibly provision solutions across a range of physical and cloud environments
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition offers flexible integration solution provisioning across a range of physical and cloud-based deployment options. Stable and tested configurations are available for use with IBM Workload Deployer and IBM PureApplication™ System. These offer particular benefits in deploying and managing an integration solution:

Workload Deployer allows the rapid deployment and simplified management of a large-scale deployment of IBM Integration Bus across your existing hardware infrastructure. Demands for newly deployed systems can be quickly satisfied, hardware utilization optimized, and maintenance costs reduced.
PureApplication System enables IBM Integration Bus to provide preconfigured integration capabilities as part of an optimized hardware and software private cloud platform. IBM Integration Bus provides the foundational integration capabilities with which PureApplication System patterns of expertise deliver complete software solutions.

Should your integration requirements develop or change, you have the freedom to nondisruptively transition between these options irrespective of the initial selection.
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition can serve as a basis for the provisioning of IBM Integration Bus on public cloud environments using bring-your-own licensing.
Import and convert existing integration assets from WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus
IBM Integration Bus represents IBM’s strategic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) offering and is the successor product for existing clients of both WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB.
IBM Integration Bus provides tooling that facilitates the conversion of existing WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus assets so they can run on IBM Integration Bus. The tooling enables:

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Project Interchange files to be imported and viewed
Common flow primitives to be converted automatically whilst maintaining the flow structure
An understanding of remaining manual tasks via a task list
Resulting flows to be modified and deployed

The conversion tooling is built upon an extensible framework, enabling further enhancements that reduce the number of manual tasks required.
WebSphere MQ
WebSphere MQ V7.5 is provided with IBM Integration Bus.
WebSphere Adapters
WebSphere Adapters V7.5 for SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards are provided with IBM Integration Bus. The adapters enable connectivity to these commonly used package applications. These adapters are available for both development and production usage.
Modes of operation
IBM Integration Bus offers a number of modes of operation to licensed clients. The mode of operation may be selected at any time, subject to the purchase of license entitlement. Existing clients may select any mode of operation at deployment time and are not required to reinstall their existing IBM Integration Bus media.

Express® Edition provides an entry-level starting point to deploy an integration solution with the option to grow to full function and performance. It has restricted features and is limited to one process.
Standard Edition offers the choice of a full-feature mode of operation, which is limited to one process, or a restricted mode of operation without capacity restrictions. This intermediate edition offers the flexibility to fulfill either broad-capability or high-performance scenarios.
Advanced Edition is the full-feature edition of IBM Integration Bus with no function or capability restrictions imposed. It is the default mode of operation.

Hypervisor Editions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX
The Hypervisor Editions offer a combination of IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere MQ, and the operating system compatible with the supported hypervisor, optimized to run in server virtualization environments.
Remote Adapter Deployment (RAD) Edition
The RAD Edition enables deployment of adapters for connecting to applications and other data sources, including databases.
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Transfer License
The IBM Integration Bus WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Transfer License provides comparable capabilities and performance to those available in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. It offers a restricted mode of operation without capacity restrictions.
Maximizing the value of your IBM software investment
IBM Software Subscription and Support is one of the most cost-effective ways for your business to ensure that your users have access to the latest technology. Whether you choose to upgrade and how you choose to upgrade are always up to you. You manage your upgrade cycles in the way that works best for your business. A comprehensive product upgrade and Technical Support solution, IBM Software Subscription and Support, available through IBM Passport Advantage® and Passport Advantage Express , delivers:

Product upgrades
New releases and new versions
Phone and technical support

For information on the benefits of migrating to IBM Integration Bus, contact TxMQ by emailing Chuck Fried, [email protected].
For more information and the complete announcement, please click here.

IBM Integration Bus V9 Delivers Key Enhancements

Posted on April 30, 2013 | by admin

IBM® Integration Bus V9, previously known as IBM WebSphere® Message Broker, delivers a comprehensive integration solution, In addition to connecting together a wide range of applications, services, and systems across heterogeneous IT environments, it provides the visibility and control capabilities needed to support critical business activities such as monitoring, auditing, process management, and analytics.
New enhancements allow clients to:

Rapidly enable business insight to be applied to in-flight data
Accelerate the creation of integration services for business process management (BPM)
Increase operational awareness and control over workload
Gain visibility and insight of integration in application environments

The new capabilities naturally extend the powerful productivity features of IBM Integration Bus to develop and manage integration solution deployments and extend its industry-leading performance and scalability.
Integration Bus V9.0 delivers key enhancements that enable greater visibility and insight of data as it flows through the bus. This allows you to:

Apply business insight to make near real-time decisions to influence processing flow
Rapidly create integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages
Manage integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages
Include application-to-application integration in centralized business activities
Improve elasticity and response time by exploiting flexible caching capabilities
Monitor and visualize performance statistics in real time
Exploit new patterns to rapidly integrate Microsoft™ applications
Flexibly provision solutions across a range of physical and cloud environments
Import and convert existing integration assets from IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus

Availability Dates:
June 14, 2013

IBM Integration Bus V9 – Electronic distribution
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX®, V9 – Electronic distribution only
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterpise Linux™ Server for x86, V9.0 – Electronic distribution only

July 5, 2013

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 – Media Pack

For the full announcement, please click here.