More and more, IT systems have to respond almost instantaneously to an event or a collection of events. Military command-and-control systems, massively multiplayer online games and stock trading are just some of the systems that need this quick response. For example, the systems aboard one of the U.S. Navy’s most modern warships, the DDG 1000 destroyer, must evaluate and respond to a missile attack within 10 seconds.
Meeting the challenge of designing cost-effective “responsive systems” is not easy and demands more than just throwing more hardware at the problem. And the situation is complicated by the size of modern IT installations. Responsive systems now must span data centers, rather than being confined to a single computer system.
The latest issue of the IBM Systems Journal (Volume 47, Number 2, 2008) examines the challenges for providers of platforms, middleware, and tools and offers some of the latest research on the subject.
“Because computer networks have been growing larger over time and because the volume of events generated by the distributed applications they host has been increasing at a fast pace, developers have turned to the use of advanced methods for designing and implementing new event-processing applications,” said Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, Vice President of Strategy and Technology, IBM Software Group. “These methods, which include improved message-oriented middleware services, service-oriented architectures, and component-based techniques for software development, lower the costs of developing and deploying responsive applications.”
Learn more:
IBM Systems Journal (Volume 47, Number 2, 2008)