Showing papers in "Ibm Systems Journal in 2004"

The utility business model and the future of computing services

Abstract: The utility business model is shaped by a number of characteristics that are typical in public services: users consider the service a necessity, high reliability of service is critical, the ability to fully utilize capacity is limited, and services are scalable and benefit from economies of scale. This paper examines the utility business model and its future role in the provision of computing services.

Web services on demand: WSLA-driven automated management

Abstract: In this paper we describe a framework for providing customers of Web services differentiated levels of service through the use of automated management and service level agreements (SLAs). The framework comprises the Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) language, designed to specify SLAs in a flexible and individualized way, a system to provision resources based on service level objectives, a workload management system that prioritizes requests according to the associated SLAs, and a system to monitor compliance with the SLA. This framework was implemented as the utility computing services part of the IBM Emerging Technologies Tool Kit, which is publicly available on the IBM alphaWorksTM Web site.

Preparing for utility computing: The role of IT architecture and relationship management

Abstract: In this paper we examine the likely impact of utility computing on information technology (IT) outsourcing. Drawing on a set of eleven outsourcing cases and on IT outsourcing literature, we identify four risks that lessen the potential benefits of IT outsourcing. We consider two approaches to outsourcing: selectively managing a network of outsourcing partners and managing large-scale exclusive partnerships. The firms in our sample introduced a number of popular relationship management practices in order to counter the risks of outsourcing. We describe their practices but then observe that, in addition to the capability of managing their vendor relationships, the firms' ability to generate value from outsourcing depends on the maturity of their IT architectures. We discuss the implications of both vendor relationship management and architecture design capabilities as firms seek the benefits of utility computing, and conclude that both continue to play key roles. We close with some recommendations as to how firms can use relationships to build effective architectures and how an effective architecture built around standards-based technologies and business process components can enable a firm to capitalize on the strategic agility that utility computing offers.

Utility computing SLA management based upon business objectives

Abstract: It has become increasingly desirable for companies worldwide to outsource their complex e-business infrastructure under the utility computing paradigm by means of service level agreements (SLAs). A successful utility computing provider must be able not only to satisfy its customers' demand for high service-quality standards, but also to fulfill its service-quality commitments based upon business objectives (e.g., cost-effectively minimizing the exposed business impact of service level violations). This paper presents the design rationale of a business-objectives-based utility computing SLA management system, called SAM, along with implementation experiences.

Building an example application with the unstructured information management architecture

Abstract: IBM's Unstrutured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is a software architecture for developing and deploying unstructured information management (UIM) applications. In this paper we provide a high-level overview of the architecture, introduce its basic components, and describe the set of tools that constitute a UIMA development framework. Then we take the reader through the setps involved in building a simple UIM application, thus highlighting the major UIMA concepts and techniques.

Eclipse: a platform for integrating development tools

Abstract: Modern n-tier applications are developed using components implemented in many different technologies, including HTML, Java™, JavaServer Pages™ (JSP™), Enterprise JavaBeans™, connectors, COBOL or PL/1 programs, and relational database schemas. Creating an effective integrated development environment (IDE) for use in programming these applications presents some special challenges because a large number of different tool technologies have to be tightly integrated in support of development task flows. In order to meet these challenges, the Eclipse Platform was designed to serve as the common basis for diverse IDE-based products, providing open APIs (application programming interfaces) to facilitate this integration. This paper describes the overall architecture of the Eclipse Platform and the www.eclipse.org open source organization and consortium created to facilitate broad industry adoption of this platform.

The role of ontologies in autonomic computing systems

Abstract: The goal of IBM's autonomic computing strategy is to deliver information technology environments with improved self-management capabilities, such as self-healing, self-protection, self-optimization, and self-configuration. Data correlation and inference technologies can be used as core components to build autonomic computing systems. They can also be used to perform automated and continuous analysis of enterprise-wide event data based upon user-defined configurable rules, such as those intended for detecting threats or system failures. Furthermore, they may trigger corrective actions for protecting or healing the system. In this paper, we discuss the use of ontologies as a high-level, expressive, conceptual modeling approach for describing the knowledge upon which the processing of a correlation engine is based. The introduction of explicit models of state-based information technology resources into the correlation technology approach allows the construction of autonomic computing systems that are capable of dealing with policy-based goals on a higher abstraction level. We demonstrate some of the benefits of this approach by applying it to a particular IBM implementation, the eAutomation correlation engine.

Evolution of grid computing architecture and grid adoption models

Abstract: During recent years, we have witnessed a major paradigm shift in distributed computing principles, with a focus towards service orientation, open standards integration, collaboration, and virtualization. One particular area of interest centers on the evolution of grid computing principles into the mainstream of distributed computing and Web services. In this paper, we focus our analysis on this evolution and the significance of achieving some form of standardization of grid-computing architecture principles. This paper presents the technology standards that are driving major grid initiatives and explains in simple terms how these standards and technologies are aligned with the IBM on demand business concepts. In addition, we discuss the recent Web services specifications related to stateful resources (i.e., resources whose behavior is defined with respect to their underlying state) and how these standards relate to grid computing. We conclude with discussions exploring major aspects of grid-computing adoption models and some significant attributes that influence the transformation, collaboration, and virtualization features of these models.

How to build a WebFountain: An architecture for very large-scale text analytics

Abstract: WebFountain is a platform for very large-scale text analytics applications. The platform allows uniform access to a wide variety of sources, scalable system-managed deployment of a variety of document-level "augmenters" and corpus-level "miners," and finally creation of an extensible set of hosted Web services containing information that drives end-user applications. Analytical components can be authored remotely by partners using a collection of Web service APIs (application programming interfaces). The system is operational and supports live customers. This paper surveys the high-level decisions made in creating such a system.

Design and implementation of the UIMA common analysis system

Abstract: The Common Analysis System (CAS) is the subsystem in the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) that handles data exchanges between the various UIMA components, such as analysis engines and unstructured information management applications. CAS supports data modeling via a type system independent of programming language, provides data access through a powerful indexing mechanism, and provides support for creating annotations on text data. In this paper we cover the CAS design philosophy, discuss the major design decisions, and describe some of the implementation details.

The four-domain architecture: an approach to support enterprise architecture design

Abstract: Managing an enterprise architecture is a challenging task. While careful planning typically goes into its design, an enterprise architecture actually emerges as a result of implementing individual projects. It is this de facto architecture, not the conceptual one, that provides the capabilities for executing business strategies, and understanding this emergent architecture is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present the Four-Domain Architecture (FDA), which integrates business process, information, knowledge, and elements pertaining to infrastructure and organization. The FDA approach can help guide the development of both the conceptual and emergent architecture. The FDA helps an enterprise in the definition, design, and creation of a set of tools and methods to support frameworks such as the Zachman framework.

A text-mining system for knowledge discovery from biomedical documents

Abstract: This paper describes the application of IBM TAKMI® for Biomedical Documents to facilitate knowledge discovery from the very large text databases characteristic of life science and healthcare applications. This set of tools, designated MedTAKMI, is an extension of the TAKMI (Text Analysis and Knowledge MIning) system originally developed for text mining in customer-relationship-management applications. MedTAKMI dynamically and interactively mines a collection of documents to obtain characteristic features within them. By using multifaceted mining of these documents together with biomedically motivated categories for term extraction and a series of drill-down queries, users can obtain knowledge about a specific topic after seeing only a few key documents. In addition, the use of natural language techniques makes it possible to extract deeper relationships among biomedical concepts. The MedTAKMI system is capable of mining the entire MEDLINE® database of 11 million biomedical journal abstracts. It is currently running at a customer site.

Business process choreography in WebSphere: combining the power of BPEL and J2EE

Abstract: Business processes not only play a key role in business-to-business and enterprise application integration scenarios by exposing the appropriate invocation and interaction patterns; they are also the fundamental basis for building heterogeneous and distributed applications (workflow-based applications). Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) provides the means to specify business processes that are composed of Web services as well as exposed as Web services. Business processes specified via BPEL4WS are portable; they can be carried out by every BPEL4WS-compliant execution environment. In this paper we show how the IBM J2EE™ application server, WebSphere® Application Server provides such an environment, called process choreographer environment, and how the extension mechanism built into BPEL can be used to leverage the additional capabilities of J2EE and WebSphere.

Price-at-Risk: A methodology for pricing utility computing services

Abstract: Whereas most companies use the century-old cost-plus pricing, this pricing method is especially inadequate for services on demand because these services have uncertain demand, high development costs, and a short life cycle. In this paper we propose a novel methodology, Price-at-Risk, that explicitly takes into account uncertainty in the pricing decision. By explicitly modeling contingent factors, such as uncertain rate of adoption or demand elasticity, the methodology can account for risk before the pricing decision is taken. The methodology optimizes the expected "net present value," subject to financial performance constraints, and thus improves on both the cost-based and value-based approaches found in the marketing literature.

Text analytics for life science using the unstructured information management architecture

Abstract: Biomedical text plays a fundamental role in knowledge discovery in life science, in both basic research (in the field of bioinformatics) and in industry sectors devoted to improving medical practice, drug development, and health care (such as medical informatics, clinical genomics, and other sectors). Several groups in the IBM Research Division are collaborating on the development of a prototype system for text analysis, search, and text-mining methods to support problem solving in life science. The system is called "BioTeKS" ("Biological Text Knowledge Services"), and it integrates research technologies from multiple IBM Research labs. BioTeKS is also the first major application of the UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) initiative also emerging from IBM Research. BioTeKS is intended to analyze biomedical text such as MEDLINETM abstracts, medical records, and patents; text is analyzed by automatically identifying terms or names corresponding to key biomedical entities (e.g., "genes," "proteins," "compounds," or "drugs") and concepts or facts related to them. In this paper, we describe the value of text analysis in biomedical research, the development of the BioTeKS system, and applications which demonstrate its functions.

Using a utility computing framework to develop utility systems

Abstract: In this paper we describe a utility computing framework, consisting of a component model, a methodology, and a set of tools and common services for building utility computing systems. This framework facilitates the creation of new utility computing systems by providing a set of common functions, as well as a set of standard interfaces for those components that are specialized. It also provides a methodology and tools to assemble and re-use resource provisioning and management functions used to support new services with possibly different requirements. We demonstrate the benefits of the framework by describing two sample systems: a life-science utility computing service designed and implemented using the framework, and an on-line gaming utility computing service designed in compliance with the framework.

Glossary extraction and utilization in the information search and delivery system for IBM technical support

Abstract: In this paper we describe the practical aspects of extracting and using a glossary for a selected technical domain. We first describe the existing glossary extraction process, as applied to general corpora, and examine its shortcomings in the technical support domain. Then we propose a number of enhancements to it, including focusing the glossary on a selected domain context, providing support for multidomain glossaries, and importing domain-specific dictionaries. We apply our focused-glossary approach to the IBM Technical Support corpus and incorporate resulting glossaries within the information search and delivery system used by IBM Technical Support. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating the quality of keywords and terms extracted from sample documents with the help of these glossaries.

WebSphere Studio overview

Abstract: In this paper we provide an overview of IBM WebSphere Studio, a family of tools for developing distributed applications for J2EE™ servers for state-of-the-art information technology systems. In today's business environment such systems are complex, comprise multiple platforms, and make use of a wide range of technologies and standards. Through a representative development scenario we illustrate the way WebSphere Studio satisfies the challenging requirements for a modern integrated development environment. The scenario covers a variety of technologies and standards, including database access, Web services standards, Enterprise JavaBeans™ implementation, integrated application testing, Web page design, and performance optimization. We also describe the Eclipse Modeling Framework, the open source technology base on which WebSphere Studio is built.

Towards the next generation of enterprise search technology

Abstract: Unstructured information represents the vast majority of data collected and accessible to enterprises. Exploiting this information requires systems for managing and extracting knowledge from large collections of unstructured data and applications for discovering patterns and relationships. This paper elucidates the differences between search systems for the Web and those for enterprises, with an emphasis on the future of enterprise search systems. It also introduces the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and provides the context for the unstructured information management (UIM) papers that follow.

WebSphere application server: a foundation for on demand computing

Abstract: WebSphere® Application Server is the foundation for IBM's middleware software portfolio. It has evolved rapidly from a simple extension for Web servers and a server runtime for business objects to the IBM distributed operating system for mission-critical computing and the leading application server in the industry. WebSphere Application Server plays a central role in the transformation from a distributed operating system to a distributed on demand operating system. This transformation is achieved by forging extensions to the WebSphere Application Server foundation for the grid-computing infrastructure, rich Web-based interaction models, service-oriented architecture, autonomics, business process management, and dynamic provisioning and utility management. This paper describes elements of the WebSphere Application Server architecture and how this architecture provides a foundation for the on demand computing infrastructure and application environment.

Policy-based automated provisioning

Abstract: The term "policy-based computing" refers to a software paradigm that incorporates a set of decision-making technologies into its management components in order to simplify and automate the administration of computer systems. A significant part of this simplification is achieved by allowing administrators and operators to specify management operations in terms of objectives or goals, rather than detailed instructions that need to be executed. A higher level of abstraction is thus supported, while permitting dynamic adjustment of the behavior of the running system without changing its implementation. This paper focuses on the application of the policy-based software paradigm to the automated provisioning architecture described elsewhere in this issue. We show how the use of policies can enhance utility computing services by making them more customizable and more responsive to business objectives.

Global namespace for files

Abstract: We propose a name service that enables construction of a uniform, global, hierarchical namespace, a key feature needed to create a file-system grid. Combined with other grid replication and location-lookup mechanisms, it supports independence of position for users and applications as well as transparency of data location in a scalable and secure fashion. This name service enables federation of individual files as well as file-system trees that are exported by a variety of distributed file systems and is extensible to include nonfile-system data such as databases or live data feeds. Such a federated namespace for files can be rendered by network file servers, such as NFS (Network File System) or CIFS (Common Internet File System) servers, proxies supporting the NAS (network-attached storage) protocol, or grid data service interfaces. File access proxies, which handle protocol translation, can also include caching and replication support to enhance data access performance. A uniform namespace with global scope and hierarchical ownership allows sharing file data between and within organizations without compromising security or autonomy.

Towards an information infrastructure for the grid

Abstract: In this paper we present our vision of an information infrastructure for grid computing, which is based on a service-oriented architecture. The infrastructure supports a virtualized view of the computing and data resources, is autonomic (driven by policies) in order to meet application goals for quality of service, and is compatible with the standards being developed in the technical community. We describe how we are implementing this vision in IBM today and how we expect the implementation to evolve in the future.

The utility metering service of the Universal Management Infrastructure

Abstract: One of the main characteristics of on demand computing in general and of utility computing services in particular is the "pay-as-you-go" model. To implement this model, one needs a flexible way to meter the services and resources being used. The UMI (Universal Management Infrastructure) architecture, designed to provide common functions that are needed by most, if not all, of the utilities in a utility computing system, therefore includes a metering function. The architecture of the metering system is hierarchical and highly flexible. This paper reviews the metering service architecture and describes how UMI's metering service function is used in the context of utility computing services, for collecting and storing metered data, computing service metrics (which are useful to the data-consuming applications), and feeding the metrics to various consumer modules (e.g., for accounting and billing).

Abstract interdomain security assertions: a basis for extra-grid virtual organizations

Abstract: One significant challenge in building grids between organizations with heterogeneous security systems is the need to express and enforce security policies that specify the users in one organization (the source domain) who are allowed to access the resources in another organization (the target domain). This requires linking the syntax and semantics of security assertions referring to users and their attributes in the source domain to those referring to resources in the target domain. This paper suggests some basic requirements for solving this problem, in particular, an abstract form of interdomain security assertion (IDSA) relying, for instance, on globally meaningful URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) to refer to users, resources, and their attributes. This canonical abstract form of IDSA is, however, used strictly for assertion mapping purposes. It may--but need not-- be visible in any concrete security assertion syntax in any domain. The paper further suggests different scenarios in which URIs for users, resources, and attributes defined in one domain can be mapped to semantically meaningful references--with varying degrees of granularity and accountability--in another domain where they would otherwise be meaningless.

WebSphere portal: unified user access to content, applications and services

Abstract: Portals provide end users with unified access to content, applications, and collaboration services in a highly personalized manner WebSphere Portal provides a middleware framework and tools for building and managing portals using component applications called portlets In this paper we provide an overview of WebSphere Portal and describe its role in modern information technology systems We describe its highlevel architecture and main features, we detail some of its advanced features, and we outline directions for its future development

A Web content serving utility

Abstract: Utility computing allows users, or customers, to utilize advanced technologies without having to build a dedicated infrastructure. Customers can use a shared infrastructure and pay only for the capacity that each one needs. Each utility offers a specific information technology service, delivered on a pay-as-you-go model. This paper describes the design and development of a content-serving utility (CSU) that provides highly scalable Web content distribution over the Internet. We provide a technology overview of content distribution and a summary of the CSU from a customer perspective. We discuss the technical architecture underlying the service, including topics such as physical infrastructure, core service functions, infrastructure management, security, and usage-based billing. We then focus on the key issues affecting the performance and capacity of both the service infrastructure and the customer Web sites it supports.

WebSphere dynamic cache: improving J2EE application performance

Abstract: The Dynamic Cache is part of the IBM solution for improving performance of Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) applications running within WebSphere Application Server. It supports caching of Java™ servlets, JavaServer Pages™ (JSP™), WebSphere® command objects, Web services objects, and Java objects. This paper describes the techniques used by the Dynamic Cache for caching these objects and demonstrates the performance improvement gained by applying these techniques to a typical enterprise Web application.

On demand web-client technologies

Abstract: This paper describes a comprehensive set of technologies that enables rich interaction paradigms for Web applications. These technologies improve the richness of user interfaces and the responsiveness of user interactions. Furthermore, they support disconnected or weakly connected modes of operation. The technologies can be used in conjunction with many Web browsers and client platforms, interacting with a J2EE™ server. The approach is based on projecting the server-side model-view-controller paradigm onto the client. This approach is firmly rooted in the Web paradigm and proposes a series of incremental extensions. Most of the described technologies have been adopted by IBM server (WebSphere®) and client products.

Enabling distributed enterprise integration with WebSphere and DB2 information integrator

Abstract: Information technology architects increasingly find themselves searching for better ways to access, integrate, and leverage their information, applications, and business processes. Information integration, in particular, is critical to the community of Web-based businesses, as firms that are able to leverage their information resources most effectively are best positioned to emerge as leaders in their industries. In this paper, we explore how companies can solve this complex business challenge by extending the reach of WebSphere® technology with DB2® Information Integrator (II). DB2 II offers WebSphere developers a new approach to coping with diverse and distributed information sources, enabling them to reduce programming costs, shorten development cycles, and attain reasonable levels of performance for server-side components that need to integrate information throughout their enterprises and partner networks.