Integration & Performance - It's all about the Clusters

As we continue our series on Enterprise Integration as a foundational element for Operational Responsiveness we venture into the world of Performance, Scalability and Reliability.

These characteristics are vital to distributed networks, and in large part, depend on transparency in the cluster to be fully realized. A cluster is a number of independent machines that behave as though they were one single logical entity. The rationale for clustering is that this single logical entity will easily scale and provide uniform performance: if one member fails or goes offline, messaging can continue. There are three dimensions of transparency that can be examined to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of an enterprise messaging solution in delivering this vision. These are administrative transparency, functional transparency, and high-availability and load-balancing transparency.

Check out the complete discussion on this topic by viewing the video podcast whiteboard session or downloading the transcript as a technical brief.

The second brief and whiteboard video in the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series, Clusters and Technologies, examines how the Progress enterprise integration solutions work. This brief focuses on administrative and functional transparency in the cluster architecture of Progress® Sonic® versus its competitors, showing why Sonic provides greater operational responsiveness at lower cost.