* Itellix Wisiba Web service management
The two big concerns over deploying Web services are performance and management. When it comes to performance it is not much use investing in a major architectural change to your business processes just to find that your service capability is sub par while not having an adequate tool set makes performance measurement and management purely theoretical.
These are problems that Itellix (see editorial links below) addresses with its Wisiba system. In fact when it comes to performance Itellix has an edge: it recently announced that its Wisiba PowerPlus proxy server has been benchmarked at handling more than 1 million requests per hour.
Wisiba is a standards-compliant, Web services management suite that aims to provide high-availability Web services with immutable interfaces, and security along with billing and contract support. Wisiba is also platform independent running under Java 1.4 on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux or Windows supporting J2EE (WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Oracle, Sun) and Microsoft .Net as well as Axis, SOAP::Lite, Glue, WASP, SOAP4R with an Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase or Postgres database.
Service integrity and availability monitoring includes “near real-time access to critical usage parameters” along with Web service usage monitoring (response time, roundtrip time, payload, etc.). Wisiba also supports availability monitoring through probes and provides alerts of outages, critical breaches, and violations via SOAP, SNMP and JMX.
Auditing under Wisiba can be configured to track specific events. Historical usage patterns are compared with current performance to identify bottlenecks and audit data can be filtered for reports on severity, priority, and type or event.
Wisiba’s security features include role-based authorization, granular access control, and service consumption authentication. The system can be integrated with existing security infrastructure such as LDAP and support for security standards such as SAML, WSSecurity, XML Encryption, and XML Digital Signature is included.
Policy management facilities under Wisiba allow for simple “point and click provisioning of new Web services,” usage contracts definition, a registry of services, permissions and policies, service end point virtualization, parallel service versioning, version based access control and deprecation support, dynamic version selection by consumer identity, commissioning and decommissioning services and mirrors.
Wisiba offers powerful service-level agreement management and SLAs can be based on raw metrics as well as business defined metrics. Compliance monitoring measures performance and evaluates SLA obligations providing notification on critical thresholds and violations. Services can be prioritized and “Best Effort” queues are used for requests beyond promised Levels.
Wisiba includes “plain vanilla load balancing,” rules driven routing and multiple routing algorithms with coordinated failover to alternate mirrors.
Failover can also be managed by customer grade or be defined for specific users and failover policies can include no retry, retry binding, and retry selection directive.
This is an awesome specification for Web service management at the enterprise level. Pricing, which starts at $25,000, is based the number of Wisiba proxy instances run by the customer.
