Application Center is a tool for creating, deploying, and managing Web- and component-based applications. Typically, these are line-of-business applications that require a high level of availability and need to provide acceptable response time. The servers hosting these applications are expected to handle traffic that is characterized by high volumes, exponential growth curves, and load fluctuations.
This software-based solution is designed to provide the capital cost advantages of the scale-out model, while at the same time providing reduced operations costs—one of the main advantages espoused by proponents of the scale-up model.
In addition to these cost benefits, Application Center provides:
Good performance, of course, is desirable in any product. In addition to offering optimal load balancing algorithms for different types of applications, Application Center provides tools for monitoring system performance and allows the system administrator to adjust load on a server-by-server basis. This approach recognizes the realities of heterogeneous server farms and provides far greater flexibility than the one-size-fits-all approach.
In addition to providing the benefits itemized in the preceding section, Application Center had to meet specific design goals. These goals were the result of numerous visits to customer sites, focus groups, and consumer surveys that took place before any product design began.
The customers said:
We need integrated tools for managing deployment on a group of servers.
Users could configure load-balanced Web and COM+ servers, but in order to deploy content they had to manually propagate resources with a series of complex and difficult-to-maintain in-house scripts.
NLB is too detailed and complicated for generic implementations.
This interface exposed far more configuration detail than was needed, such as dedicated IP addresses and port rules.
Monitoring and capacity analysis tools need to be integrated with application tools.
Users had to navigate through different tools and interfaces to gather basic information about a Web site or COM+ application.
There should be some central concept of what constitutes an application—its elements and their relationship to each other.
Beyond the pages that are served, Web sites do not imply any additional elements or settings that are associated with the site. For example, COM+ applications may be required for proper site functionality, but this relationship is never expressed nor discovered through any of the tools.
The following goals are highlights from the vision statement that was prepared in response to customer feedback: