Chapter 1: Prepare Your WebSphere Web Site for E-Business on Demand

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Overview

Executive summary: In the last few years, IBM's High-Volume Web Site (HVWS) team has engaged with many large customers to help them understand their workloads, and to design and implement highly scalable e-business infrastructures. The resulting systems operate now to meet the unpredictable workloads common to an e-business. When not meeting peak demands, however, these resulting infrastructures are often left with excess capacity. Excess capacity and the increasing pressure to improve the return on investment are combining to drive businesses to seek new opportunities to use existing resources.

Several leading-edge customers are already working with IBM to optimize their resource use and to consider how emerging on demand technologies and standards can be part of the solution. While the technologies and standards are still under development, there are actions to take now so that when the technologies and standards are available, you'll be ready to transform to on demand computing and benefit from its advantages of managing workloads dynamically, adding applications without adding computing resources, and reducing human intervention.

Among the key technologies for enabling e-business on demand are grid computing and autonomic computing. A grid is a collection of distributed computing resources available over a network that appears to an end user or application as one large virtual computing system. A grid can span locations, organizations, machine architectures, and software boundaries offering the promise of providing virtually unlimited power, collaboration, and information access to everyone connected to the grid. One effect of grid computing can be to make network computing more like a utility. You deliver computing power to where you need it only when you need it; you pay for what you use, when you use it.

In addition to grid computing, autonomic computing is moving from concept to reality using Web services and Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) programming constructs. Autonomic computing is an approach to self-managed computing systems with minimal human intervention. Using a combination of grid and autonomic computing, infrastructures will be able to monitor current workload, analyze it versus historical trends and available resources, plan the reallocation of those resources, and automatically execute the movement of workload or resources to maximize computing responsiveness to meet service level objectives; in autonomic terms, this is called the autonomic control loop. This will allow server farms to act as a single virtual computing resource.

Having aligned itself around e-business on demand, IBM has new offerings and roadmaps for virtualization technologies that encompass servers, storage, networks, and distributed applications. IBM makes it possible for enterprises to virtualize WebSphere resources today, so that they don't have to wait until tomorrow to realize the business value of the on-demand operating environment. See Chapter 2 to learn how enterprises can use the new and enhanced WebSphere features as the first steps in building and realizing the value of resource virtualization. Enterprises that virtualize will be ready to implement emerging on-demand offerings such as IBM Server Allocation for WebSphere Application Server, a limited offering developed by IBM Research and the HVWS group.

This chapter introduces the early work of some of our customers and summarizes the IBM Server Allocation for WebSphere Application Server. The chapter identifies what you can do now to improve resource use and ready your e-business to benefit from on demand computing. The last section provides a quick introduction to grid computing and autonomic computing and identifies where you can learn more.

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