Nitin Gaur

Lately I have been engaged with many clients that are maniacally focused on reduced costs by means of reduced footprint. In this post, I attempt to discuss some of my thoughts and experiences towards this trend: Growth poses a problem: As business grows so does the resulting infrastructure and primarily the middleware which houses the business logic and in some cases this tier shares the presentation or the store front with business logic. So with growth in business either due to larger client base or new business model implies similar growth in middleware. This consistent growth poses a few challenges some obvious ones include costs – not only of software but also hosting infrastructure and hardware. Some non obvious challenges include manageability of platform i.e. general administration, handling performance and Service level agreement (SLA) and addressing scala... (more)

Apache Hadoop and WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Hadoop Apache Hadoop is a software framework (platform) that enables a distributed manipulation of vast amount of data. Introduced in 2006, it is supported by Google, Yahoo!, and IBM, to name a few. At the heart of its design is the MapReduce implementation and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), which was inspired by the MapReduce (introduced by a Google paper) and the Google File System. MapReduce MapReduce is a software framework introduced by Google that supports distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers (or nodes). It is the combination of two pro... (more)

How Does In Memory Data Grid IMDG Solve the Scalability Problem?

Understanding Scalability In understanding the scalability challenge addressed by WebSphere eXtreme Scale, let us first define and understand scalability. Wikipedia defines scalability as a "desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added." Scalability in a system is about the ability to do more, whether ... (more)

Anatomy of Cloud Computing Platform

Introduction As the IT operations continue to evolve and transform the business towards agility and adaptability to ever changing rules of marketplace, the efficiency of any IT operation is of paramount significance. The phrase ‘time to market' has a completely new meaning in today's dynamic business environment where the only constant is change. This rapidly changing environment has lead the IT and business leaders alike to re-think the ‘procurement to provisioning' process with one goal in mind - Efficient use of resources. These resources include IT assets such as hardware an... (more)

IBM CloudBurst and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance Compared

What is a cloud computing platform? Is it simply automated provisioning systems coupled with a resource virtualization, where the workload is policy driven, and resources over committed and any resource contention handled by policy driven resolution? As it turns out technologies that provide provisioning, virtualization and policy enforcement form the building blocks of a true cloud computing platform, but not any one technology is a cloud offering in and of it self. IBM’s CloudBurst family attempts to provide a single cloud solution with an appliance form factor. This paper will... (more)