WebSphere Commerce High Availability and Performance Configurations

Nobody came up with an example of a website powered by a Websphere product (which has a community edition) and backed up by a DB2 database.

I guess you all know about usopen.org so here's the story:

While the re-emergence of 35-year-old Andre Agassi and the continued dominance of wunderkind Maria Sharapova have highlighted the on-court headlines at this year's U.S. Open Tennis Championships in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., IBM is hoping its new Power5 chip-based IT support for USOpen.org can make news among those more interested in .NET than tennis nets.

Big Blue has partnered with the U.S. Tennis Association and the U.S. Open -- the most prestigious tennis tournament in the U.S. -- since 1992. Together, they launched USOpen.org in 1995 so racket heads could follow the matches online.

The iSeries' role this year is in powering a Web-based end-user application called "Point Tracker," a graphics tool using autonomic technology that recreates the trajectory of every shot. On-court cameras capture and record ball position data for every forehand, ace and volley. Once that data is integrated with the scoring data, the shot data is pushed to the Web site to enable visitors to follow the action online.

IBM is running the Web site on an eServer pSeries system, a Power5-based server.

Two pSeries systems, models p550 -- released two weeks ago -- and p570, replaced Web and application servers to help automate the infrastructure that supports the Web site. The 2005 U.S. Open Web site traffic will be managed by Big Blue from a "virtualized" server environment at one of the three hosting locations.

According to IBM, the pSeries systems allow IBM to consolidate several servers onto two larger boxes.

The pSeries p5 systems handle USOpen.org workloads from Web serving to fan polling, feedback and player search applications, which are managed from each pSeries p5 server as a virtualized environment using Power-based virtualization technologies such as Micro-Partitioning, Virtual I/O Server and Partition Load Manager, which consolidate AIX 5L and multiple Linux operating environments onto a single system.

Approximately 2.8 million fans visited USOpen.org during the two-week tournament in 2004.

More information on this technologies can be found here:

Quote from IBM redbooks:

Building a high performance and high availability commerce site is not a trivial task -- from having right capacity hardware to handle the workload to properly testing the code change before deploying in production site. This redbook covers several major areas that need to be considered when using WebSphere Commerce Server and provide solution on how to address them. Here are some of the topics:

1. How to build a Commerce site to deal with various kind of unplanned outage? Topic including utilizing WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment 6.0 and IBM DB2 High Availability disaster Recovery (HADR) in Commerce environment.

2. How to build a Commerce site to deal with planned outages such as software fix and operation update? Topic including uses of WebSphere Application Server's Rolling update feature and uses of Commerce's Staging Server and Content Management.

3. How to proactively monitoring the commerce site prevent potential problem happening? Various Tools should be discussed including various WebSphere Application Server build-in tools and Tivoli's Composite Application Management.

4. How to utilized dynacache to future enhance your Commerce Site's performance? Topics includes additional Commerce command caching introduce in Commerce Fix pack and e-spot caching.

5. What's the methodology of doing performance and scalability testing on Commerce site? Tools that may be covered included Tivoli Performance Tester

6. Techniques on migrate a high volume Commerce site to newer Commerce release.
" end Quote

Maybe some of us can find this useful, Websphere Community Edition is a free Java™ EE 5 server for building and managing Java™ applications.

Download this Redbook