• xTier™/LWC 2.3 for Java
• xTier™/GRID 2.3 for Java
• xTier™/CACHE 2.3 for Java
• xTier™/CLUSTER 2.3 for Java

xTier™/LWC 2.3 for Java
Service Oriented Light-Weight Container


The Problem
How can applications be developed with a short ROI, low TCO and at the same time provide significant functional value?

The Answer - xTier™ 2.3 for Java
xTier™ 2.3 for Java is a robust, scalable and proven service oriented middleware that provides a collection of high-value 'infrastructure level services'. Simply stated, infrastructure level services are services which provide a "service" to the rest of the code base.

• xTier™ 2.3 for Java decreases the project duration: xTier™ reduces the time to delivery by removing the burden of developing the "infrastructure level" components that make up a large amount of every development project.
• xTier™ 2.3 for Java increases the overall system reliability: xTier™ provides a robust and scalable set of systems services.
• xTier™ 2.3 for Java increases reusability: xTier™ provides a loosely coupled set of services that can be "mixed-and-matched" and used throughout the enterprise on a wide variety of development projects.
• xTier™ 2.3 for Java increases productivity: xTier™, by providing a consistent and reusable collection of services, makes developers more productive in two ways, 1) they are no longer writing "infrastructure-level" or "helper" code, but are writing code that encapsulates the business process of the enterprise, i.e those the provide a direct value, and 2) xTier's™ itself can be reused in a wide variety of projects across the organization.
• xTier™ 2.3 for Java is widely deployable: xTier™ has runtimes for Java that run across Windows, Solaris as well as Linux.

 Top

xTier™/GRID 2.3 for Java
Grid Computing for Java - Made Simple


xTier™/GRID 2.3 for Java simplifies the process of creating an application that can take advantage of parallelized execution. Designed for high-performance and ease of use xTier™/GRID provides a simple and robust Java API that can be rapidly integrated into existing enterprise architectures. An application that is xTier™/GRID enabled enjoys near-linear scalability and practically unlimited expandability.

With xTier™/GRID hardware resources can be more effectively utilized while at the same time increasing the performance of the enterprise applications. By linking together multiple servers in the data center, xTier™/GRID provides a virtualized pool of computing resources that can be leveraged by all of the enterprise applications that have been enabled with xTier™/GRID. Once an application has been xTier™/GRID enabled, additional hardware resources can be added to this pool with absolutely no changes to the code base.

Typically, grid computing has been the purvey of very specific, high-performance computing projects, but in fact, almost every enterprise application has a computationally intensive component that can benefit from xTier™/GRID enablement. Without xTier™/GRID these applications would require dedicated, silo-ed hardware that is in most cases significantly underutilized. In fact server resources are typically utilized at approximately 30%.

xTier™/GRID virtualizes these underutilized resources and turns them into a common pool of processing power that can be used by any xTier™/GRID enabled application. The enterprise benefits from a lower TCO and can increase the ROI of existing and new server expenditures. In effect, organizations can “do more with less.”

xTier™/GRID is well suited to providing financial services, bio-informatics and pharmaceutical research, manufacturing, oil and gas exploration (seismic analysis) and governmental or academic research projects with the robust platform and aggregated computational resources that can solve mid- to large-scale computational questions.

xTier™/GRID can be deployed almost anywhere, Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, all of the major application servers. The only requirement that xTier™/GRID imposes is that the hosting platform must have a version 1.4 or greater JVM. Application deployment is not limited to single operating system (homogeneous) deployments – xTier™/GRID tasks can be executed in a mixed environment consisting of any of the target platforms which xTier™/GRID supports (Windows, Linux, Solaris).

Further, xTier™/GRID is ideally suited to both dedicated installations (where hardware is allocated to running the grid and nothing else), and situations where xTier™/GRID is installed alongside existing applications. Using innovative grid topology resolution design, the developer has fine grained control over the distribution of tasks across the hardware that the grid is running on. xTier™/GRID imposes very little overhead on the host hardware, and the amount of processing power allocated to the grid node can be tailored to provide optimum response with no disruption of the existing non-grid processing requirements of that node.

The xTier™/GRID platform provides the following benefits:

xTier™/GRID	Benefit
Direct support for task splitting and aggregation.	Deploy grid applications in weeks, not months.
Easy to use, configure and manage.	Programmers concentrate on the task at hand, not complex IPC.
Allows developers to customize and extend the supplied implementation to tailor the xTier™/GRID for very specific environments.	Allow for highly-specialized implementations should the application dictate specialization.
Support for near real-time applications.	Highly-optimized inter-grid communication allows for low latency response.
Support for dynamic allocation of computing resources (using the supplied xTier™/CLUSTER).	Add and remove grid nodes on-demand.
Seamless integration with the entire xTier™ services collection.	Additional productivity from the additional components designed for grid application development.
Cross-paradigm implementation for mixed run-time grid deployments.	Utilize both C# and Java.

Concentrating on optimized task splitting, and high-performance inter-grid communication, xTier™/GRID provides the developer with the tools required to build high-performance grid applications without the unnecessary complexity found in many other solutions. Developers are immediately productive with xTier™/GRID which allows xTier™/GRID development projects to be deployed often in weeks, not months.


 xTier™ Grid Service - Technical Whitepaper
 xTier™/GRID 2.3 for Java - Product Details

 Top

xTier™/CACHE 2.3 for Java
Non-Replicable Distributed Cache


xTier™/CACHE 2.3 for Java is designed to significantly increase the performance of Java/J2EE-based applications without increasing the hardware and software that application is deployed upon. xTier™/CACHE is relevant to almost all Java/J2EE applications across a wide variety of industries. Any application that accesses an underlying data store, or that has computationally expensive computed results can benefit from xTier™/CACHE.

xTier™/CACHE offers the developer the ability to cache application data in-process which allows for near zero latency response times upon data retrieval. This data can be computed results, complex query results, or any other data that is repeatedly accessed by the application. xTier™/CACHE can cache everything from simple objects (POJOs) to complex depended query result-sets.

Application performance is increased in three ways: decreased load on the database tier resulting in increase efficiency; decreased processing requirements on the application tier; and decreased bandwidth consumption on the network.

xTier™/CACHE makes the most of your existing database investment by significantly reducing the load on the database tier. By insulating the database from repeated requests for the same data xTier™/CACHE significantly reduces the number of transactions that the database must process. Additionally, by offering robust support for ACID-compliant distributed transactions, the underlying database can be run in the higher-performance read-committed mode.

xTier™/CACHE positively impacts the application tier as well. xTier™/CACHE increases application response time as there is no blocking waiting for results to be returned from the underlying data store. xTier™/CACHE also reduces the CPU utilization imposed by data serialization and de-serialization (the processes required when sending or retrieving data from a database or other back-end datastore). Or in the case of computed results, these results can be computed once, and stored in the cache for immediate and repeated retrieval.

The network infrastructure that your application runs within will benefit from xTier™/CACHE as well. By caching data a significant reduction in network traffic (due to fewer round-trips to the database to retrieve data) will be experienced. Additionally, network directly attributed to the xTier™/CACHE cluster is kept to a minimum. Designed for speed, xTier™/CACHE has a unique design that provides the highest performance possible upon cache invalidation and has a very light-weight presence on the network.

The xTier™/CACHE is a non-replicable cache which provides very high performance for both applications in which the cached data is updated infrequently and applications in which the cached data is updated with moderate frequency. This is a very important feature for applications as they begin to scale - with a replicable cache the performance in general degrades as each additional cache node is added to the cache cluster. In contrast nodes can be added to an xTier™/CACHE cluster with no performance degradation.

xTier™/CACHE supports Windows, Linux and Solaris and deploys on all of the major application servers. The only requirement that xTier™/CACHE has is that there be a 1.4 JVM installed on the target deployment environment.

This combination pf features and deployability allows the developer to increase application performance, maximize the existing investment in hardware and software and provide an overall superior application experience to the end user.


 xTier™ Cache Service - Technical Whitepaper
 xTier™/CACHE 2.3 for Java - Product Details

 Top

xTier™/CLUSTER 2.3 for Java
Advanced Cluster Computing


Designed for applications that demand the highest level of performance, xTier™/CLUSTER 2.3 for Java provides all of the tools necessary to build clustered Java/J2EE applications. Although most J2EE application servers (containers) allow application clustering, this functionality is embedded deep within the container and is in many cases completely inaccessible to the application developer.

For the developer with specialized requirements, (such as a need to tailor application response based upon the physical characteristics of a given node, or if specific requests need to go to specific nodes in the cluster), developers are left with no option but to implement simplified clustering capabilities to meet the requirements of this application.

xTier™/CLUSTER provides the developer with an open and extensible clustering functionality and provides a simple and powerful API to cluster-enable any user application without restriction. By using xTier™/CLUSTER the application developer is freed from hand-coding the infrastructure needed for successfully creating and deploying a clustered application.

In addition to providing facilities for load-balancing, fault-tolerance, and cluster topology management, a unique feature of xTier™/CLUSTER is the ability to segment the cluster into one of more "virtual clusters". This is highly useful and can be used for such things as segmenting the cluster based upon node characteristics or providing a view to a specific subset of nodes.

xTier™/CLUSTER supports Windows, Linux and Solaris and deploys on all of the major application servers. The only requirement that xTier™/CLUSTER has is that there be a 1.4 JVM installed on the target deployment environment.

With xTier™/CLUSTER application developers can increase the robustness of their quickly and easily while concentrating on creating business value for the enterprise rather than needlessly creating infrastructure level code.


 xTier™ Cluster Service - Technical Whitepaper
 xTier™/CLUSTER 2.3 for Java - Product Details

 Top