Oracle and IBM Web Server Platforms

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Evaluating the Web Server Platforms

Industry benchmarks use Java operations per second and Java operations per second per processor cores to assess J2EE application performance and the components that make up an application environment. IBM WebSphere offered the best overall performance.

Operational Challenges

The major challenges facing organizational enterprise is to assess its existing investment in IBM mainframe system software and the Oracle database platform in terms of:

1. Database scalability, performance, security, and cost.

2. SOA: Service Oriented Architecture framework for application and platform migration.

3. Distributing processing and web server integration with the IBM mainframe.

4. Developing Infrastructure Clouds and integration with FOSS: Free Open Source Software.

5. New application development.

Oracle versus IBM

WAS: WebSphere Application Server is a J2EE 1.5-compliant platform for assembling, deploying, and managing applications that are part of an SOA environment. WAS is the foundation of the IBM WebSphere software platform and offers Feature Packs as well as complementary technologies for management including WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid, and WebSphere eXtreme Scale. IBM eXtreme Scale uses a one-phase commit to offer better performance and scalability. The WebSphere product also offers support for both synchronous and asynchronous replication. Asynchronous replication allows for system activity to continue in the background to increase application responsiveness, accelerate data intensive applications, and provide high availability and fault tolerance.

The IBM commercial WAS products have a shared architecture and are built on the same code base; this translates into developer investments in applications which can be repurposed across the commercial WAS offerings. Applications originally written for and deployed on a WAS Express for Windows server can be moved without any coding changes to any other WAS server.

Oracle has two application servers: the Oracle Application Server and WLS: WebLogic Server. WLS is an established server technology that has transcended past ownership changes to remain a leader in the marketplace. It is being rebranded as Oracle WebLogic Application Server. Oracle's strategy is to make WebLogic its preferred application server. The challenge for Oracle will be managing two different application server environments and addressing technical issues which arise in its software roadmap.

Oracle’s Coherence uses a two-phase commit transaction protocol that lets all nodes in a distributed system agree to commit a transaction. The protocol results in either all nodes committing the transaction or aborting, even in the case of network failures or node failures. The greatest disadvantage of a two-phase commit is that a node will block while it is waiting for a message. This means that other processes competing for resource locks held by the blocked processes will have to wait for the locks to be released. Coherence also uses synchronous replication support which can slow down the system and affect recovery times. In both cases, this inhibits performance. 

Scalability

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale functions as an in-memory data grid that dynamically caches, partitions, replicates, and manages application data and business logic across multiple servers. It can also process high-transaction volumes efficiently and with linear scalability, while offering support for higher-level programming models.

Oracle’s scalability is achieved through clustering technology, cross-domain management, and diagnostic tooling. Oracle offers Coherence, an in-memory data grid acquired from Tangosol. Coherence provides the capability for scaling and wide support of programming models.

Application Infrastructure Virtualization

IBM’s WVE: WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides prioritization and flexibility of deployment of the applications using pooled resources. WVE provides functionality analogous to a server hypervisor, but for the application server. It is application aware and provides wide range of services for workload and transaction management, as well as service level agreements beyond what the Oracle and BEA solution can address.

Unlike WebLogic Operations Control, which only supports BEA products, IBM’s WVE supports other application servers including WLS and JBoss. IBM WVE provides lower cost of operations, greater flexibility and agility, and better health management via application infrastructure virtualization and server consolidation.

In order to achieve a level of AIV from Oracle and BEA products, several offerings must be deployed together. These include VMware ESX Server, Windows or Linux OS, LiquidVM, BEA WLS Virtual Edition, and Oracle WebLogic Operations Control. Oracle's acquisition of WebLogic Operations Control and WLS Virtual Edition provide significant strength in management and resource control of VMware server virtual machines and in supporting Service Level Agreements with calculations for a variety of statistics. The combination of three discrete Oracle products does not offer the same level of application management and quality of service as WVE.