 | Edge Components WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment addresses the needs of highly available, high volume environments with the inclusion of sophisticated load balancing, caching and centralized security capabilities based on Edge Components, known as WebSphere Edge Server in earlier releases. Features and benefits - Load Balancing. The load-balancing component in WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment provides a scalable solution for distributing and routing HTTP, servlet, and Enterprise JavaBean™ (EJB) requests. As the load on one server or a cluster of servers with similar content increases, the load balancer can redirect this incoming traffic to underused servers to help maintain optimal response times for each site visitor. Incoming user requests are routed to back-end servers depending on their availability, performance and on the relevance of the application or components they host.
- Custom Advisors. Custom advisors can be used to load-balance requests based on unique application and platform criteria. To ensure ever-changing, accurate traffic allocation to back-end servers, an advisor can be deployed to be as high level as periodically determining the overall status of the servers, or as granular as checking specific application response times on the servers. Once the server health is determined, the advisor informs the load balancer "manager" function, which then sets weights for the servers to determine which server should receive new session or application requests. Through advisor code, traffic is appropriately routed to the optimal back-end server.
- Consultants. To extend the load balancing capabilities beyond purely a WebSphere Application Server environment, consultant code can be used to optimize server performance within a Cisco or Nortel infrastructure. Consultants generate server weighting metrics and distributes them to Cisco CSS 11000 switches or Nortel Alteon 180 series of switches for optimal server selection, load balancing and fault tolerance.
- Enhanced Caching. The edge-of-network caching capability in WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, improves response time by offloading back-end servers and peering links. And, in contrast to other caching proxies that can cache static content, the edge proxy server can also cache - and invalidate – dynamically-generated content from the WebSphere Application Server, such as JSP™ and servlet results to create a virtual extension of the application server cache into network-based caches – or to caches in the Akamai network through the implementation of Edge Side Includes (ESI) technology. The caching proxy also provides the following plug-in support:
- A Tivoli Access Manager plug-in described below (see Centralized Security).
- A plug-in that allows users to exploit an LDAP-based repository for storing user authentication and authorization information.
- An authentication/authorization plug-in that allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to exploit third party authentication/authorization mechanisms such as RADIUS or SecurID tokens.
- Edge Side Includes (ESI) support. ESI is a simple mark-up language and proposed standard for the dynamic assembly of Web page fragments, such as stock quotes and individual catalog prices. By leveraging ESI technology, dynamic content caching is extended by moving fragments from the Application Server to a proxy server that resides in the network - such as Akamai's. This enables caching to occur at a more granular level, as well as allowing companies to position page composition at the most optimal location, closer to the end user. As a result, companies can improve user experiences through expedited, personalized page composition, and reduce workload on the network servers due to fragment offload to the edge.
- Centralized Security. Tighter integration has been developed between the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment and the Tivoli Access Manager with the Tivoli Access Manager plug-in. This will enable you to build centralized identity management solutions with global sign-on capabilities and enforceable policies to secure cached and non-cached J2EE™, Portal, Web and legacy resources. In addition, companies who implement this integrated solution will benefit from the ease of working with a single object namespace, representing the full set of security policies for the resources you want to protect.
|
