Editor's Letter

WebSphere’s Biggest Week

Dear WebSpherian,

Hopefully, I will see you next week at Impact 2011 in Las Vegas. Here are some of the activities next week planned for attendees and the entire WebSphere community:

GWC Daily Blogging Contest.  Every day you blog on WebSphereUserGroup.org between Monday, April 11 and Thursday, April 14 you have a chance to win a US$50 American Express gift card.  You do not need to be attending Impact to win!  Every day you blog on the site, you have a new chance to win the gift card.  We will announce each day’s winner on WebSphereUserGroup.org the next morning.

GWC New Member Contest. Become a new member of the Global WebSphere Community between Monday, April 11 and Thursday, April 14 you have a chance to win a US$50 American Express gift card.  Again for this contest, you do not need to be attending Impact to win! We will announce each day’s winner on WebSphereUserGroup.org the next morning.

Tip: If you are already a member, convince a colleague to join.  If you colleague wins, perhaps you will reap a benefit, too!

Live streaming of the Impact keynotes on WebSphereUserGroup.org.  If you cannot attend the keynotes, just visit the GWC website and watch the presentations live from anywhere.

Play the GWC’s  “Spin It to Win It” in Lido 3101A&B.  Spin our wheel for an opportunity to be the daily winner of a Kindle reader, a Flip video camera, JVC noise canceling headphones, or hundreds of other cool prizes.

Perk up your GWC presence in the FaceBooth. Tired of the same old profile picture?  Have some fun and take a new profile picture in the GWC’s FaceBooth.  We provide the props, you provide the face.

GWC hats and t-shirts for new members.  Become a member onsite at Impact and get your choice of a cool GWC hat or t-shirt.

We look forward to reading your blogs and welcoming new and old members in the GWC Community Room in Lido 3101A&B.  We’ll have refreshments and fun all day Monday, April 11 through Wednesday, April 13 from 9am-5pm and on Thursday, April 14 from 9am-noon. And remember: even if you can’t come to Impact, you can still be part of the excitement!

Best Regards,

Bruce Lynch, Editor and Publisher
The Sphere Journal Online

The Leading Edge of WebSphere

Elastic Caching For Connectivity

By Lan Vuong and Charles Le Vay

What is elastic caching?  Let’s start with defining what caching is.  Caching is the storing of objects, usually closer to the user, to minimize response time from redundant requests.  Elastic caching builds on top of a typical cache by adding the ability to expand and contract the size of your cache based on need.  You can easily expand your cache on demand to add capacity and contract to take down servers for maintenance.  Both actions occur dynamically while the cache is still running and handling requests.

IBM^® offers two solutions in the elastic caching space, IBM WebSphere^® eXtreme Scale and IBM WebSphere DataPower^® XC10 Appliance.  The XC10 Appliance is built for simple, drop-in caching scenarios that require few application code changes.  WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides the ultimate flexibility across a broad range of caching scenarios.  Both solutions provide linear scalability, high availability through data replication and simplified management and monitoring.

A common use case for caching solutions is the side cache.  In this scenario, the application is aware of both the cache and the back end database or service.  For each request, the application first checks the cache to see if the object is located in the cache.  A cache miss occurs when the data is not there and the application makes a request to the back end.  The application then inserts the data into the cache.  The next time the same object is requested it can be retrieved from the cache resulting in a cache hit, faster response time, and reduced demand on the back end system.

The side cache is an easy scenario to integrate caching with an enterprise service bus.  An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a critical component of a Service Oriented Architecture. The ESB connects and integrates applications, services and business process flows at the messaging layer. It performs protocol mediation, message transformation, routing, process choreography, and provides quality of service (security, reliable message delivery, and transaction management).  

In a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), all application requests pass thru the ESB before they are routed to the application. Therefore, if the result of an application request is retrieved from the elastic caching tier, the application processing and processing latency for that request are eliminated. The result is a significant decrease in response time and reduction of application processing.  We’ll review three scenarios where the WebSphere elastic caching solutions integrate with WebSphere ESBs to improve response time and increase total system throughput.

The first scenario involves appliance integration between the WebSphere DataPower XC10 and XI50.  The WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 is a secure, easy-to-deploy hardware ESB.  The current release of the DataPower XC10 firmware includes a REST Gateway, allowing non-Java based clients access to simple data grids using a set of HTTP based operations.  Using the REST Gateway feature, the XC10 can be used as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) results side cache for the WebSphere DataPower XI50.

To use the XC10 as a side cache, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Proxy is defined as the first component in the XI50 processing chain. It uses a set of “caching policy” rules, to determine the cacheability of each incoming request. The rules are application specific, but in general, caching policy rules might trigger on the request URI, specific XML contents within the request body or a combination of both. The rules are defined using a set of XSLs. The XSLs are then loaded into the XI50 memory. Additionally, this set of XSLs is used to generate the appropriately formatted REST requests to the XC10 REST gateway to store/retrieve data in the grid.  Refer to this article for the XML Proxy sample and tutorial on how to configure the XI50.

The second integration scenario covers WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus along with WebSphere eXtreme Scale.  WebSphere eXtreme Scale v7.1 cumulative fix 1 includes two mediation primitives that allow you to insert and retrieve data from the cache with the WebSphere Business Process Management and Connectivity products. These products integrate with various back end systems and WebSphere eXtreme Scale may be added to the configuration to cache the output of these systems, increasing the overall performance of your configuration.

You can integrate WebSphere eXtreme Scale into your configuration without changing the business process by using the mediation flows that are provided by WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.  Read-only service requests can pull results from caches and be configured to load caches on misses.  Due to nature of mediations the solution is service and binding agnostic.  Refer to this page on the WebSphere eXtreme Scale product wiki to install the mediation primitives.

The third integration scenario includes WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere eXtreme Scale.  In this scenario, a JavaCompute node is added to the message flow to check the cache for data.  The code defines classes to represent the objects for caching and uses eXtreme Scale’s ObjectGrid APIs to interact with the cache.  The ogclient.jar file must be added to the classpath to use the ObjectGrid APIs, which has simple get and insert methods to access the data.  

You’ll notice that with all three integration scenarios that although there may be some coding involved, there are no application code changes.   This makes it easy to leverage WebSphere eXtreme Scale or WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance as the caching solution for your ESB.  Using these products as the side cache improves response times and enhances throughput as redundant calls are stored for rapid access.  

Special thanks to Ryan Claussen and Joel Gomez for their contribution to this article.

Your WebSphere Deep Diving Instructor

Column 3 April 2011

By Andy Piper, WebSphere Messaging Community Lead, IBM

As I write this I’ve just returned from presenting at an event called “Hursley Comes to You” that ran in Madrid, Spain, and preparing for the big WebSphere event of the year, the annual IMPACT conference in Las Vegas. If you’re expecting to be there, do come and look me up!

So what is exercising the brains of our customers and developers at the moment? Well, the hot theme I’ve spent a lot of time on during the past few weeks has very much been WebSphere MQ’s new Advanced Message Security feature.

WMQ itself has a number of levels of security built right in to the product, of course. It integrates with the operating system’s security, be that user ACLs and PAM on Linux, or RACF on z/OS, or Windows users in Active Directory - so that enables us to secure access to files used by the queue manager, and to understand native user IDs. WMQ also contains the Object Authority Manager (OAM), which is a mechanism for specifying granular permissions on objects owned by the queue manager - so we can say that Alice has PUT and GET access to a particular queue, but perhaps Bob only has BROWSE permissions, for example.

The next thing to think about is security across the network. WebSphere MQ has that covered out-of-the-box via the SSL support for channel connections, which means that channels can be authenticated and encrypted.

That leaves the messages themselves. Not every application will generate a scenario where the messages themselves need to be encrypted “at rest” on a queue, but some do - particularly where you’re thinking about personal information (healthcare and government situations, for example), or payment systems. You could write code in your application which encrypts the data before giving it to WMQ of course, but that would mean choosing an encryption scheme, sharing that information between applications, each application having to make the code changes, inflexibility in changing it, and basically tying up the encryption - which should really be a configuration choice and change - inside the applications in a “brittle” manner which is resistant to change.

So that’s there WebSphere MQ Advanced Message Security comes in. The idea here is that you, the WMQ administrator, can individually select which queues contain high-value data that need protection, and create policies which apply encryption as the messages are put and got from applications. So you can take any existing WMQ application, and really quickly enable protection for messages on the queues it uses (oh, by the way, that includes WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition file transfers, WebSphere Application Server applications that use WMQ as their JMS provider, etc). No code changes, just install and configure Advanced Message Security. If I do say so myself... it’s pretty cool stuff.

I presented a GWC webinar on WMQ AMS last month with the product architect from our Hursley lab, and since then I’ve been fielding a lot of questions from new and prospective users. It’s definitely “what’s hot” at the moment in the messaging space, so I’d say it’s worth a look.

The Message Queue

News and Notes on What’s Happening Today with WebSphere and Business

IBM is Winning the Middleware Battle Against Oracle
IBM is returning fire to Oracle in an increasingly heated battle over who has the faster stack of middleware.

IBM recently released new SPECjEnterprise 2010 benchmarking statistics that "demonstrate how businesses using IBM WebSphere middleware on Power 7 hardware can get the lowest cost for performance in the industry." IBM also claimed that it "has proven 76 percent higher performance than Oracle overall."

In September 2009, the TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) fined Oracle $10,000 over an advertisement Oracle placed in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that a system using Oracle hardware and software ran faster than an IBM combination, based on TPC benchmarks.

This dispute aside, both Oracle and IBM face serious challenges in middleware.

"IBM's challenge is to integrate all its acquisitions in middleware and serve it up as one solution that's simple and low-cost to own," said Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. "That's the battle they are waging now, to show they are doing this.

For more on this, go to: http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/ibm-fires-back-oracle-in-middleware-fray-572

Automation is Key to Getting the Drop on Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has put a lot of pressure on IT organizations to find a way to reduce costs and, more important, bring agility to business processes.

In traditional IT, you provision and manage equipment for a project. Your IT team may be able to take on 10-20 projects a year. The rest are what the industry calls “application backlog” or what non-IT folks call “my stuff that will never be done”. For most companies, the application backlog is an order of magnitude larger than the number of projects that actually get funded and implemented.

The promise of cloud computing is to greatly reduce or even eliminate the application backlog by removing the capital budget constraints and by greatly reducing the IT effort to provision and maintain the infrastructure. A fast rising gaming company is known to provision over 15,000 servers. You would think they have hundreds or even thousands of system administrators. They have eight. It is the magic of automation that makes this possible. In its simplest form, cloud automation provides a catalog of services and a way to deploy these services on to the cloud servers, storage, and network. And when done right, service requesters can describe what they want from the catalog and can specify how they want it deployed, all without involvement from system administration staff.

Where do you get all this wonderful automation from? As with most things IT, you can build it or you can buy it. IBM happens to offer a solution called WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance (WCA) that delivers a great way to deploy complete WebSphere environments on private cloud infrastructure. Note the emphasis on complete; we will get to it soon enough. First, a really important point that many people miss. You do not deploy to the WCA appliance i.e. it is not a server on which you run your software. WCA is a distribution and management point, a catalog, not a run-time environment. So, while it helps you dispense software, it does NOT run any of your software. The software runs on the virtual machines that make up private cloud.

The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is stocked with saved virtual machine images that have IBM middleware and your software. You get a cluster of WebSphere servers and a DB2 database server deployed in minutes on to the hardware that is your private cloud. This is why I said complete WebSphere environments in the previous paragraph. Current version (v2) of WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is really focused on WebSphere environments. A typical WebSphere application would obviously have one or more WebSphere Application Servers (WAS) and it may have other components like messaging and queuing, load balancers etc. And in almost every case it would also have a persistent data store i.e. a database. This whole environment is called a pattern in the WCA world. The process of creating and deploying patterns replaces punching of the codes for various items on a typical vending machine. WebSphere CloudBurst provides a nifty component it calls “pattern editor” where you drag components from the catalog to define and describe the servers that comprise a pattern. Four WebSphere Application Servers, a load balancing server, and a cluster of DB2 servers in a high availability configuration … this may be a pattern that you would create for your next project. Not only can you specify the servers, you can also specify the connections between these servers. Drop a line between your WebSphere cluster and the DB2 HADR cluster and you have the WAS connection pool, properly configured for getting data out of your database. Do these patterns have to have WebSphere servers? Not at all, you can use WCA to provision patterns of just DB2 servers if you wish.

How do you pay for the software the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance deploys? WCA has a catalog of virtual machine images with various IBM middleware products. While the images are in the catalog on the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, you still have to purchase the licenses. WebSphere Application Server machine images are known as “Hypervisor Edition” and you would be purchasing licenses for these special “Hypervisor Edition” products and entering these licenses in to the “License Management” tool that is a part of the WCA.

IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance

Current version of the WCA does not have DB2 images on the appliance. You download the images and add them to the appliance yourself. The process is very easy and takes a few minutes. As with all products, DB2 images contain configured and optimized virtual machines complete with the operating system (SLES) and DB2 Enterprise Edition v9.7 software but they do not contain licenses for either the operating system or for DB2.

Also notice that DB2 is not called “Hypervisor Edition”. This means you can purchase standard DB2 Enterprise Edition licenses and apply these licenses for DB2 running on “bare metal” hardware, or toward running on virtual servers in the private cloud, or toward virtual servers in the public cloud like Amazon EC2 or the IBM Cloud. Let’s say you bought a 1000 PVUs of DB2 Enterprise Edition. You could allocate 600 toward your DB2 servers for your existing hardware and put remaining 400 PVUs in to the WCA License Management tool. Whenever patterns containing DB2 servers are deployed to your private cloud by the WCA, provisioned license capacity is subtracted by the License Management tool. If any of these patterns are decommissioned (e.g. you finished your test cycle and no longer need the environment) these licenses are returned back in to the WCA license pool for other projects to use. If it turns out that you do not need all 600 PVUs for your physical servers and 400 PVUs will suffice, you can add 200 PVU licenses to your WCA to make available to whatever projects need the capacity. While this is very flexible and convenient licensing, many of the WCA customers expect products that are provisioned by the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance to be called “Hypervisor Edition”. So, once in a while, you may actually see DB2 images being called “Hypervisor Edition” as well or we may refer to an images as “DB2 Server for WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance“. Just remember, the product you purchase from IBM or an IBM business partner is DB2 Enterprise Edition (and other editions in the future).

For more on this, go to: http://www.theinfoboom.com/articles/leon-katsnelson-websphere-cloudburst-appliance-is-a-vending-machine-for-it/

IBM Establishing a New Set of e-Commerce Consulting Services
Seeking to capitalize on the $2.5 billion in e-commerce and online marketing software acquisitions it made last year, IBM is establishing a new set of e-commerce consulting services and has developed a related certification program for channel partners.

The "Smarter Commerce" initiative is targeted toward what IBM said is a $70 billion market for IT hardware, software and services. The new practice is built around IBM's 2010 acquisitions of e-commerce software vendor Sterling Commerce, interactive marketing application developer Unica and Web analytics software vendor Coremetrics.

Hayman said the new consulting services built around those applications would help businesses adapt to today's marketplace that's been transformed by the Web and social networks. "This is the age of the empowered consumer," he said.

The combination of the new consulting services, the acquired technologies and IBM's WebSphere Commerce platform will help businesses capture information about consumers, better understand what they value and how best to engage with them, Hayman said.

IBM has created a new Enterprise Marketing Management "authorization" or certification for channel partners under the Software Value Plus program that will allow solution providers to resell the Sterling Commerce, Unica, Coremetrics and WebSphere Commerce applications. That training program is slated to be available in the second quarter.

"Resellers and partners are a big part of this strategy," Hayman said. The acquired companies each had their own channel partner programs, which Hayman said are still operating, but are being integrated into IBM's PartnerWorld channel program over time.

For more on this, go to http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/229301055/ibm-builds-services-offers-partner-certifications-around-software-acquisitions.htm;jsessionid=m2m2khWarXQ9ZS0Ro-Ndqw**.ecappj01

Florida, Carolinas Getting Smart Grids in $500M Push
Progress Energy is moving forward with its plan to spend $500 million to upgrade two of its electric utilities in Florida and the Carolinas to a smart-grid system.

Together the two utilities provide electricity service to over 3.1 million customers. The Raleigh,N.C.-based company is paying for the upgrade in part with a $200 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The grant came out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and is part of the high-profile push by the Obama administration and many state leaders to upgrade U.S. electric grids.

The project is also a boon to IBM's efforts to grow its presence in the potentially lucrative industry of smart-grid analytics. Progress Energy plans to use IBM's WebSphere software platform as a tool to integrate distribution management and demand response systems. Big Blue has also been hired to help install and implement the systems in conjunction with Progress Energy, IBM announced today.

IBM has run several pilot programs to test smart-grid systems in the past four years, including a consumer-level one in North Carolina in 2009 which found that on average, the introduction of smart-grid technology and smart meters cut electricity use by 15 percent.

In the case of Progress Energy, however, IBM's services will concentrate on equipment and system upgrades, analytics, and management that will enable the company's utilities to better control things like voltage levels, as well as electricity distribution across power lines.

For more on this, go to: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20041579-54.html

Core Performance is Using IBM ILOG and WebSphere Business Rules Management System to Help Personalize Workout Programs
Fitness services firm Core Performance is using IBM ILOG and WebSphere Business Rules Management System to help personalize workout programs.  The project is IBM’s latest move to let companies apply business rules to directly help consumers – and in turn shape up corporate bottom lines.

Core Performance assists corporations develop on-site workout facilities for employees in conjunction with personalized workout developed by Athletes' Performance.

The main hurdle for any fitness program is keeping participants interested in their workouts and motivated to stick with their workout regime.  The Core Performance Prescription Engine uses ILOG to makes its personal training programs smarter and more responsive to the needs of the individuals.

Core Performance embeds rules directly into its intelligent gym equipment, which with the IBM add-on software now has the ability to react to changing circumstances, based on rules set by Core Performance's fitness experts.

As an example, Core Performance can program equipment to allow someone working out to tell the machine if they are feeling not their best that day. The machine can then adjust the training program to ensure an effective workout while reducing the possibility of overexertion, strain or injury.

For each individual, the equipment can track metrics like wattage output, repetitions completed, and calories burned.  Combined, the data can quantify the impact of the workout programs with the help of specialists to help ensure individuals progress toward their goals.

"By making gym equipment work more intelligently, we are helping people maximize the effectiveness of their workouts," said Jon Zerden,  Core Performance’s CTO said in a statement.  "We are able to automate and customize personal training programs like no other facility to better measure an individual's progress.”

The trend of embedding intelligent rules into equipment is just the latest phrase of IBM’s move to place capability for rules and analytics in a wide variety of endpoints – all driven to help companies improve their business operations and customer satisfaction.

"Advanced rules technologies can now be embedded into everyday products to make them more efficient and attuned to their users' needs," said Pierre Haren, vice president of IBM’s ILOG products unit.  "Core Performance can differentiate itself in the marketplace by offering members a more personalized, efficient and engaging workout experience.

Earlier this year, IBM announced a new Consumer Products Industry Framework, designed to help clients reduce costs and increase revenue through improved consumer relationships, supply chain analytics and e-commerce capabilities.

For more on this, go to: http://www.idevnews.com/stories/4565/IBM-ILOG-Business-Rules-WebSphere-Power-Intelligent-Workouts

e-Spirit AG and IBM are Intensifying Their Cooperation in the e-Commerce Field
e-Spirit AG and IBM are focusing on integrating the content management system FirstSpirit and IBM WebSphere Commerce. A seamless connection of the CMS and the retail solution allows online retailers to develop powerful e-commerce platforms. They can manage and maintain content for the internet and online shop in one system with output in a wide variety of formats and channels. These include HTML, XML, PDF and optimized output for mobile end devices as well as newsletters, brochures or mailings. Retailers with attractive online offers are in a better position to meet the needs of their customers. For example, cross-channel activities are easy to implement effectively.

“Through even closer cooperation with IBM in the e-commerce solution segment, we are supporting large companies and bigger SMEs that want to increasingly use the web as a distribution channel with a strategic, easy-to-use content management platform,” said Johannes Häusele, member of the Executive Board of e-Spirit AG. “They benefit from efficient, consistent editing and retail processes, thereby saving time and reducing costs.” Users with international websites in particular are able to realize tremendous time savings thanks to the multilingual and translation management functions offered by FirstSpirit.

IBM partners and web agencies also enjoy the advantages of flexible online design and short project times to open a web shop. “Through our cooperation with e-Spirit, we are supporting the fast and flexible integration of standardized e-commerce solutions with the editorial website content. Companies therefore have a professional, integrated web distribution channel,” said Frank Flosbach, WebSphere Commerce Sales Leader Germany, IBM Germany.

To learn more about this, go to: http://www.pr.com/press-release/304104

In Focus

How to deploy e-commerce sites leveraging WebSphere Commerce’s Extended Sites model
by Shlipa Kotiyan, WebSphere Commerce Solution Architect, Ascendant Technology

This article talks about how to remodel a current e-commerce store into the standard extended sites model such that it would help simplify future creation of hosted stores easily without requiring significant development. This re-model will  help leverage WebSphere Commerce features that are available within the standard extended sites model, such as shared marketing and promotional assets and usage of the available line of business tools for configuration of the hosted sites.

Click here to read more

Business Partner in Focus: Unified SOA Governance for IBM WebSphere SOA Foundation
 
Sphere Journal Online readers can download Unified SOA Governance for IBM WebSphere SOA Foundation, brought to you by SOA Software, from the Global WebSphere Community Website.  Here’s an abstract:

SOA Software’s platform-independent Unified SOA Governance Automation solution promotes the use of best practices throughout an enterprise SOA program regardless of where services and consumers are designed, built, deployed and operated.  This allows customers to confidently use IBM WebSphere products as part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment sharing services with other commercial SOA platforms like SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle, as well as RedHat and other open source providers.

Click here to download this whitepaper