Virtualization is a key technology for many organizations. The infrastructure allows organizations to benefit from higher server utilization, faster deployment and the ability to quickly clone, copy and deploy images. The growth of virtualization is driving businesses to perfect and optimize performance to reduce the overall challenges that come with every technology. By optimizing virtualization, companies will be able to thrive in all aspects of the business.
One of the main goals of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and workloads. IBM shows that this can be optimized through 5 entry points:
1. Image management
2. Patch & compliance
3. Backup & restore
4. Cost management
5. Monitoring and capacity planning
1. Image Management – Optimize the Virtual Image Lifecycle: A virtualization environment needs core, baseline images that must be managed properly. Optimizing the environment allows an organization to manage these images throughout their lifecycle. Creating a virtual image library improves the assessing, reporting, remediating & enforcing of image standards. This improves the process of finding unused images, images that need patching, and allowing more frequent patching to provide compliance. Other strategies for image management include increasing the ratio of managed images to administrators to decrease IT labor costs and improvement self-service capabilities for end-user direct access.
2. Patch & compliance – Optimize Path Remediation: Automating the patch assessment and management increases the first-pass patch success rate by reducing IT workload and helping organizations comply with security standards. This automatic process reduces the security risk because it decreases amount of time for repairs and provides great visibility with flexible, real-time patch monitoring and reporting from a single management console. A closed loop design allows admins to patch as fast as they can provision by enabling security and operations teams to work together. This helps to provide continuous compliance enforcement in rapidly changing virtualized/cloud environments.
3. Backup and restore – Optimize Resilience and Data Protection: Data is growing as fast, if not faster, than the elements of a virtualized & cloud based environments. Protecting and managing an organization’s data is key to virtualizing optimization. Deduplication is one way to simplify and improve data protection and management. This can be accomplished by doing incremental backups. This helps simplify protection, management of data, speed restoration and backups. It also helps to conserve the resources and increase bandwidth efficiencies due to the decrease the amount of space and time of each backup. This in turn provides the business with lower equipment and management costs.
4. Cost Management – Optimize Metering & Billing: While virtualization helps organization reduce operating costs overall, optimization of this technology helps organizations know where the costs are incurred. An automatic collection of data usage provides how many resources the internal users are consuming and gives the service providers those resources incurred for accurate billing. Using this advanced analytics helps organizations better understand the use and costs of computer storage and network resources. In turn providing overall business improvement by allowing organizations to accurately charge for services.
5. Monitoring and Capacity Planning – Optimize Availability with Resource Utilization: By monitoring performance and planning with historical data, organizations can add a proactive approach to fix issues before they’re discovered and plan for the future to ensure optimized systems and applications. This approach reduces resource consumption by supporting right size virtual machine for different workloads. It speeds deployments by spotting bottlenecks and reduces licensing costs by consolidating virtual machines onto fewer hosts.
IBM provides virtualization optimization by basing cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture. Their IBM SmartCloud foundation is designed to help organizations of all sizes quickly build and scale their virtualized & cloud environment infrastructures and platform capabilities. They help provide delivery flexibility, and choices that organizations need to evolve an existing virtualized infrastructure to cloud. They help accelerate the adoption with integrated systems & gain immediate access to managed services. IBM’s expertise, open standards, and proven infrastructure will help an organization achieve new levels of innovation, and efficiency.
Category: Uncategorized
IBM Extends Modern Mainframe Capabilities With the zBC12
IBM is now extending the capabilities of the modern mainframe to organizations of all sizes with the introduction of the IBM zEnterprise BC12 (zBC12).
The zBC12 offers a proven hybrid-computing design to help manage and integrate workloads on multiple architectures within a single system. It provides an optimized infrastructure that’s integrated, agile, trusted and secure – an infrastructure that allows organizations to quickly and cost-effectively embrace new cloud, analytics and mobile opportunities.
The zBC12 offers many upgrades:
- Powered by microprocessors running at 4.2 GHz
- Provides up to a 36% boost in per-core capacity
- 58% increase in total system capacity for z/OS
- Up to a 62% increase in total capacity
- Offers up to 156 capacity settings
- 20% improvement over the z114 and IBM System z10 BC (z10BC)
The zBC12 is available in two models:
The H06: A single central processor complex (CPC) drawer model
The H13: A CPC two-drawer model that offers additional flexibility for I/O and coupling expansion, specialty engine scalability and memory scalability up to 496 GB
[title size = 3]Data Developments[/title]
IBM zEnterprise Data Compression (zEDC)
- Offers an industry-standard compression for cross-platform data distribution
- Disk savings by allowing better utilization of storage capacity
Shared Memory Communications: Remote Direct Memory Access (SMC-R)
- Optimizes server-to-server communications by helping to reduce latency and CPU resource consumption over traditional TCP/IP communications
- Any TCP sockets-based workloads can seamlessly use SMC-R without requiring any application changes
Data analytics solutions on the zBC12 include the IBM Smart Analytics System and the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator – both of which are designed to enable organizations to efficiently store, manage, retrieve and analyze vast amounts of data for business insight.
[title size = 3]Solid Security[/title]
Cryptography is one basic technology that helps protect sensitive data. The zBC12 can help organizations come into compliance with various industry standards that facilitate the environment of enterprise-security policies that govern data privacy.
The zBC12 is designed to meet the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 5+ (EAL5+) certification for security of logical partitions, helping to ensure the isolation of sensitive data and business transactions. The zBC12 offers high-speed cryptography that is built into each processor core.
[title size = 3]Cloud Capabilities[/title]
With z/OS, organizations can seamlessly run multiple disparate workloads concurrently with different service levels. With zBC12, Linux environments can expect a 36% performance boost per Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processor. The new IBM z/VM 6.3 provides improved economies of scale with support for 1 TB of real memory and more efficient utilization of CPU hardware resources.
For more information regarding mainframe capabilities or other TxMQ pillars of expertise, contact Miles Roty at (716) 636-0070 ext 228 or [email protected].
Nine Reasons Why “Nearshoring” Is a Better Choice than “Offshoring”
Over the past 10 years, the trend toward offshore service providers for software development or IT projects has become an accepted solution for most large corporations. Although these low-cost offshore developers provide some benefits for the company, they also come with challenges; cultural differences, time zone discrepancies and language barriers are just a few. All of these challenges can lead to communication issues that may ultimately hurt the business.
However, from this, a new trend is starting to emerge: service providers working for an affordable rate are now establishing in South America. These new groups of individuals and companies can deliver the same quality work that can be found elsewhere however they offer solutions to some of the shortcomings that offshoring holds.
What is nearshoring and how does it differ from offshore outsourcing?
Traditionally outsourcing or “offshoring” involves contracting IT or developer resources from countries in the Asia/Pacific region, with the most common locations being India, China, and the Philippines.
According to Dictionary.com the term “nearshoring” refers to the practice of moving one’s employees or business activities from a distant country to a country that is closer to home. Nearshoring capitalizes on benefits of proximity, which include time zones, cultural and linguistic similarities, and political factors. When it comes to the United States, this means that companies would turn to countries in Latin America, (such as Panama, Colombia, and Uruguay) that are rapidly becoming new outsourcing hubs for IT and development projects.
Advantages of Nearshoring
Nearshoring has already been a popular option for the last several years in the manufacturing sector.
9 major reasons that are leading to the increase in nearshoring:
- The cost of labor in Asia/Pacific countries is rising; Latin American countries are now competitive in price
- More than 10 years ago companies started using candidates from India and China. However this is rapidly changing, over the past few years the financial attractiveness of this option has become less favorable. According to Wendy Tate, assistant profess or logistics at University of Tennessee, “Chinese wages are now climbing at 15 to 20 percent per year… thanks to a supply-and-demand imbalance of skilled laborers in manufacturing regions, global pressure to upgrade Chinese labor practices and wages, and increased employee demands for better pay and conditions.”
- Time zone compatibility
- A large concern of those who use offshore talent is that their team is 10-14 time zones away. The logistics of scheduling conference calls is challenging. When workers are in different time zones the offshore members of the team are left to do tasks overnight for managers to examine the next morning. Then if there are problems, the manager has to wait sometimes half a day to get the updates done. In addition to this, unnatural working hours can be a problem for employees. It takes a toll on them and affects their quality of work. However in contrast, the Latin American countries fall in the same time zones as the United States, which allows for real-time conversations, normal work hours and a higher quality of deliverables.
- Available Talent
- A large selling point of offshoring to India, China and the Philippines is the high quality of education in those countries. However, because outsourcing in Latin America is just being discovered by the United States there is a very large pool of highly skilled, college-educated resources available. Universities in countries such as Columbia and Panama are well-respected in the educational community, hundreds of students from the United States travel there yearly as foreign exchange students. In addition to this, a large number of professionals in Latin America have attended universities in the United States and understand our market needs.
- Technology Infrastructure
- In 2011, Latin America and Eastern Europe surpassed India in the growth of outsourcing facilities (Source: www.nearshore.com). This is consistent with investment that have been made to improve the technology infrastructure over the past few years in Latin American countries. Fast internet connections, construction of new data centers, and improved telecommunications facilities are all helping to make the connection to US-based companies as seamless as possible.
- Language/Cultural similarities
- When dealing with countries like China there can be a large communication issue when English is not their native language or not as commonly spoken. However with most nearshoring countries providers are highly proficient in English (or the language of their client), even if it is not their official language. This can be a great advantage when communication is primarily via phone and email.
- There can also be cultural difference that can impact the work that the client does, in India there are completely different holidays then there are in the United States. Nearshoring greatly reduces these types of problems based on the fact that there is better communication and coordination between countries that have similar cultural backgrounds.
- Intellectual property protection
- In many Asian countries, the incidences of IP theft and counterfeiting are widespread. However many Latin American nations have signed Free Trade Agreements with the USA, which should guarantee IP rights to foreign companies.
- Political risk and security
- Geopolitical risk is a factor that should be strongly considered when evaluating outsourcing options. Does the country have a history of nationalizing privately-held business owned by foreign corporations? Can the government close down an operation that they consider to be contradictory to their philosophy? It is crucial to evaluate the political situation of the county where a service provider maintains staff.
- Trade regulations and compliance
- In October 2011, the U.S. Congress approved trade agreements with Panama and Colombia that have created the largest opportunity for exporters in decades. This has also increased the chances of doing business with these countries. In addition to this, Panama agreed to become a full participant in the WTO Information Technology Agreement.
- Low staff turnover
- According to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, in 2010 the IT and BPO attrition rates in India reached a startling 55%. Companies are reluctant to enter long-term projects with an offshore team, knowing that over half of the original team will be gone within one year. However this situation has not been seen in Latin American countries; the family-oriented culture of these countries along with being in the same time zones as the US makes it less likely for them to leave a position.
The benefits of nearshoring are quite clear: low costs, compatible time zones, lower staff turnover, business-friendly climate, and better protection of your intellectual property. If you are looking to outsource IT or software development, you no longer need to look halfway around the world.
TxMQ provides WebSphere® software support services to supplement our clients’ internal technical teams with proactive proble resolutions for IBM®-based and other third-party middleware processing and software.
Remote Problem Management (RPM) for Middleware includes:
- 24-hour, 7-day per week, North American-based phone support of all IBM middleware products, including but not limited to DataPower, CastIron, Portal and Process server, most Web-Servers, WebSphereMQ, WebSphere, WMB, Integration Bus, Tibco, and Database Software installed on mainframe and distributed systems
- 8×5 support for all non-severe issues requiring Level 1 support
- Support initiated via toll-free telephone number or electronic interface
- Immediate support from a middleware technician (not a generalist)
- Response time for calls placed into the toll free number is 30 minutes or less
- Pricing based on environment size, NOT user or license counts.
For more information on Remote Problem Management or for a customized quote contact Miles Roty at 716-636-0070 (228) or email [email protected].
Overview of the WAS v8.5.5 Family
WAS 8.5.5 was announced at IBM Impact and GA’ed June 14, 2013. WAS 8.5.5 provides significant performance benefits over previous releases as well as all of its competitors.
WAS 8.5.5 now includes WS Extreme Scale for caching and WAS ND 8.5 introduced last June includes WS Virtual Enterprise and WAS Compute Grid products for improved resiliency.
A full overview of the WAS v8.5.5 Family
- New WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core edition
- Entitlement to WebSphere eXtreme Scale (WXS) for some editions
- Developer install/support for WAS & WDT with active production server S&S
WAS for Developers
- Enables efficient development of innovative apps that will run on WAS in production
- Available as a no-charge edition for the developer desktop and includes Eclipse adapters
- NEW: Provide WAS and WDT editions as freely available for dev desktops and supported under production runtime licenses
WAS Hypervisor Edition
- The WAS ND server optimized to instantly run in Pure Application System, VMware, PowerVM, zVM and other server virtualization environments.
WAS ND
- Delivers near-continuous availability, with advanced performance and intelligent management capabilities, for mission-critical apps.
- Full entitlement to WXS.
WAS
- Provides secure, high performance transaction engine for moderately sized configurations with web tier clustering and failover across up to five application server profiles.
- Includes entitlement to eXtreme Scale for HTTP session caching and DynaCache on the entitled WebSphere Application Server.
WAS for z/OS
- Takes full advantage of
the z/OS Sysplex to deliver a highly secure, reliable, and resource efficient
server experience. - Entitlement to WXS z/OS client.
NEW: WAS Liberty Core
- A lightweight and low-cost Liberty profile based offering (not full-profile WAS), providing the capabilities to rapidly build and deliver web apps that do not require the full Java EE stack.
WAS Express
- A low-cost, ready-to-go solution to build dynamic Web sites & apps, including both Liberty and full-profile WAS. Restricted to a set amount of PVUs.
For more information on the WAS 8.5.5 Family or TxMQ IT Solutions and Staffing please contact Miles Roty, Vice President at [email protected] or 716-636-0070 ext 228
WAS Liberty Profile (Web Profile Only)
WebSphere Liberty Core
In June of 2012 WAS V8.5 came out and introduced the Liberty profile.
Liberty Profile is a lightweight server for faster development and easy deployment of web apps. Less than 50mb to download from the Web, customers can download easily at WASdev.net for free (for desktop).
It restarts in less than 3 seconds which is important for developers wanting a FAST environment (faster than Jboss).
With WAS 8.5.5 there is now a separate offering priced competitively with OSS: WAS Liberty Core: $26/pvu list price or competitive tradein at $13/pvu). This price is very competitive with Tomcat and likely cheaper than Jboss.
WAS Liberty Core provides full fidelity to WAS ND for customers who may want to use it for devt and ND for production.
A lightweight and low-cost Liberty profile based offering (not full-profile WAS), provides the capabilities to rapidly build and deliver web apps that do not require the full Java EE stack.
The problem of a lightweight development environment in WAS has been solved!
- WAS Liberty Profile startup & footprint are on par with Tomcat
- WAS Liberty Profile starts up in less than half the time of JBoss Web profile
Note: Tomcat , JBoss, and GlassFish were measured with the HotSpot JDK, while Liberty was measured with the IBM JDK
Liberty Profile is a lightweight server that can service requests with the speed of a full production server.
- Liberty Profile provides up to 20% better runtime performance than JBoss and 25% better than Tomcat.
Note: Tomcat , JBoss, and GlassFish were measured with the HotSpot JDK, while Liberty was measured with the IBM JDK.
For more information on WAS Liberty Profile and how it can help your business or TxMQ IT Solutions and Staffing please contact Miles Roty, Senior Account Manager?[email protected] 716-636-0070 ext 228
IBM Worklight V6.0, IBM Mobile Applications Platform Pattern V6.0, and IBM Mobile Foundation V6.0
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
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
- One appliance can handle all the car circulating in Manhattan in a day
- 13M non-persistent msg/sec
- Allows massive fan-out streaming of data
- 400K persistent msg/sec
- When assured delivery matters
- 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:
- MQTT protocol – efficient pub/sub protocol designed for M2M
- Java Messaging over high speed protocol
- Active development community on developer Works
- http:www.ibm.com/developerworks/connect/IBMmessaging
- 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
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
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
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 |
|
| Mobile Messaging |
|
| Managed File Transfer |
|
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).
