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Emic Networks has added JSP and J2EE application server support to its Application Clustering platform, a clustering technology that has supported the LAMP stack and now supports the LAMJ stack, the company will announce at LinuxWorld in Boston on Tuesday.
The San Francisco company has also split its LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) or LAMJ (Linux, Apache, MySQL, JSP/J2EE) bundle up so that customers can purchase stand-alone products. Stand-alone components support MySQL, Apache or JSP/J2EE.
Emic CEO Eero Teerikorpi said that Emic is coming across many corporations that have taken their first steps toward implementing LAMP, but which are hitting boundaries on what existing open-source solutions provide.
“MySQL may not prove to be adequate with high-bandwidth sites,” for example, Teerikorpi said. Such customers seek help from Emic via its clustered solution, which can provide clusters up to 60 nodes.
Donna Jeker, Emics vice president of product marketing and management, said that MySQL ABs imminent release of a production version of MySQL 5.0, which is slated to support stored procedures and triggers and other features important to enterprises, means that those enterprises are increasingly looking to adopt the full LAMP or LAMJ stack.
“A lot of those enterprises are using Java, so we can fit in that environment as well,” Jeker said. The production version of MySQL 5.0 is expected to be released at MySQLs user conference in April.
The top issues that concern customers who want to adopt an open-source stack have been missing functionality, continuous availability and manageability issues, Jeker said.
Many larger corporations have established management frameworks, for example, through which databases must be managed. “Manageability cant be just for point solutions, just for a single component in the stack,” she said. “You have to mange the whole stack and integrate with existing management frameworks.”
To address that prerequisite, Emics latest version of Application Clustering has gained a new dispatcher-based load balancer that supports full redundancy for the clusters “dispatcher” node.
The aim is to reduce the number of single points of failure, but the feature is also designed to allow Application Clustering to transparently integrate into existing environments without the necessity of reconfiguring routers and switches.
As far as addressing enterprises need for continuous availability goes, a new manual deferred-standby mode is designed to simplify planned maintenance tasks—such as table reorganization or index rebuilding—by allowing any node to be placed in deferred standby mode. Nodes on standby mode continue to receive updates, but those updates are deferred until users have completed maintenance.
Support enhancements also include controls and mechanisms that give users system status information.
Laura DiDio, an analyst for The Yankee Group, based in Boston, said that Emics new Application Clustering product addresses corporations need for a product that will enable them to maximize the technical performance of applications and decrease total cost of ownership.
“The shortage for open-source distributions is there arent as many off-the-shelf applications as for Windows, Macintosh,” and other operating systems, she said. “Whether its Macintosh, Unix, Linux or some flavor of open source, theyve all reached some level of maturity, where youve got pretty good reliance, scalability, performance and whatever. As you go up the stack, the value is really in the applications and the services associated with them.…”
“While the applications have advanced, and the hardware and operating systems have advanced to the point where applications can make better use of the underlying operating systems, still, people are trying to do more, more, more…” DiDio continued. “That puts a strain on resources. … How do you maximize the performance? Squeeze the last drop out of your investment? Clustering has become a very popular solution. … Emic, its a new class of software for clustering. And because its multiplatform, it helps.”
Emics Application Clustering will be available on Tuesday starting at $1,595.