Jean-Christophe Martin's blog - Architecture category

Sun XVM and Ops Center

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:36:29 GMT

Sun announced new virtualization products last week. It seems to be a version of Xen hypervisor running on solaris . So now, Sun has three Solaris virtualization technologies: XVM, Solaris Containers, and LDOM. So, what it means is that a Sparc Server can be running a solaris container in a solaris XVM in an LDOM. This is 3 layers of virtualizations.

Also, in this announce, Sun presents Ops Center. This is a re-branded N1 System Manager. It seems that the focus will be on the management of the hardware, up to the operating system, combined with Sun Connection.

Mark Hamilton told The Register:

Sun has also announced a new management software package, Ops Center, that will work as a command and control console for physical and virtual gear- that's to say the hypervisor and Solaris Containers. Sun said the software also includes discovery and inventory, application provisioning, software lifecycles automation, hardware and software monitoring and compliance reporting. Sun brazenly says "it does everything except unpack boxes and rack and cable systems."

Ops Center is going to be released in December. It will be interesting to see how this can be leveraged by Configuration Automation tools like what BMC announced recently.

Technorati Tags: datacenter management, system management, virtualization

IBM acquires Webify

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 23:32:00 GMT

Today, IBM announced that they are acquiring Webify:

ARMONK, NY - 02 Aug 2006: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it acquired Webify Solutions, an Austin, Texas-based, privately held provider of industry-specific software and services for building service oriented architectures (SOA).

Webify provides what they call Industry Fabrics :

The Webify Industry Fabric is an integrated environment for policy driven sourcing, assembly, delivery and governance of business services and composite business services. It consists of six complementary modules that allows companies to source, provision, deliver, and govern industry-specific business services, processes, content, and events from a variety of internal and external sources.

They have fabrics for the following industries:

Healthcare
Banking
Telecom
Insurance

Technorati Tags: soa

SOA 2.0 and why it doesn't really fly

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:37:00 GMT

You might have read about the tentative to create a new version of the Service Oriented Architecture dubbed SOA 2.0.
You might also have seen the rise of opposition to this new term on some blogs like Elemental Links or even an online petition to oppose this term.

The main rational for creating a new version of SOA seems to be :

With SOA 2.0, an event-driven architecture is deployed in which software modules are related to business components, and alerts and event notifications are featured. The initial SOA concept has not been event-driven but instead has featured direct calls from one piece of software to another in a client-server process, Natis said.

Well, that doesn't fly. What events are we talking about here ? In which way these events are different from asynchronous service invocations ? What about messages sent on an ESB like Mule or openESB ? Are they events ?

I would point to this article for a good example on how EDA and SOA can come together, without releasing a new architecture version.