DataSynapse Cloaks the Middle Tier with Grid Fabric

DataSynapse has taken the grid concept to the application layer, releasing software designed to lift transactional workloads in order to grid-enable existing infrastructures predominantly comprised of the J2EE stack, the company announced at GridWorld.

DataSynapse has taken the grid concept to the application layer, releasing software designed to lift transactional workloads in order to grid-enable existing infrastructures predominantly comprised of the J2EE stack, the company announced at GridWorld in Boston on Monday.

The new server software, called FabricServer, is designed to virtualize transactional applications within a shared grid environment, thus granting better performance, resiliency and manageability.

The companys flagship product is GridServer. Whereas GridServer is dedicated to grid-enabling compute- and data-intensive applications, FabricServer is meant to be a lightweight solution for rapid deployment; easy integration with leading application server vendors, including BEA, JBoss and Oracle; and support for other service-oriented applications.

Jamie Bernardin, chief technology officer, said FabricServer is meant to get organizations to quickly scale and share application server environments with greater control and less complexity, unlike traditional approaches, which rely on manual provisioning of static clusters or proprietary appliances that increase footprint and cost.

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"What weve heard from clients is that obviously [GridServer] is a very valuable, adaptive infrastructure for them, and theyd like to see these types of benefits extended to other application areas that are critical to their mission-critical [business]," he said.

Bernardin said that more online transactional applications are using Java application servers to leverage the benefits of grid computing. With a grid-enabled application layer such as FabricServer, e-commerce sites or portals would be serviced by more than one computer that uses a variety of middleware architectures, such as clustering.

"What we see now in the data center is an enterprise will have a multitude of applications that are stand-alone that are statically provisioned to run over a set of revisions," he said. "Theyre configured to run over an amount of hardware that can satisfy peak" load, he said.

That means systems are over-provisioned for peak loads. By focusing on the middle tier—the application server area—DataSynapse Inc. provides support for major application servers, as well as some other, cheaper or lighter-weight application servers, such as Tomcat.

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FabricServer then takes existing architectures and runs them as-is, without the need to configure machines or point to other resources, for example.

"Instead, we do that dynamically at run time, so applications can exist over a variable amount of machines," Bernardin said.

The decision to provision is based on business priority policy and on demand to ensure maximum performance and reliability of business-critical applications by monitoring and managing key metrics such as throughput, latency and resource utilization. Thus, meeting service levels is guaranteed. If service levels are breached, resources are immediately reallocated as necessary.

FabricServer supports J2SE, J2EE and .Net environments.

The product is in beta testing at a few sites that Bernardin declined to name. DataSynapse will make it generally available on Dec. 15.

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