WebSphere Transaction Cluster Facility

As with many companies, you likely have an IT environment that includes multiple, diverse technology platforms, applications, and assets. Furthermore, you are probably under constant pressure to rationalize and reduce this environment to a smaller set of target platforms and infrastructure that can enable cost reduction and reduce complexity. Although this is a sound approach that enables an IT executive to deliver bottom-line results, there are likely needs and trends in your industry or in your business that continues to justify your requirement for a diverse set of platforms and technologies. These forces are driven largely by the diversity of the workload characteristics and non-functional requirements.

Larger IT trends, such as the growth in mobile computing, will likely drive portions of your existing systems to their limits. These workloads are what will push you beyond your desired reduced set of platform patterns. For these workloads that you anticipate dramatic volume growth, a different approach is required if you are going to achieve IT efficiency. The focus of this approach should be on selecting platforms and technologies that are workload-specific and optimized.

In this IBM® Redguide™ publication, we introduce an example of a workload-optimized offering that can provide a high performing and highly scalable solution for a targeted and demanding style of transaction processing. IBM WebSphere® Transaction Cluster Facility (WTCF) is a new offering that provides the foundation for you to deploy mission-critical online transaction processing (OLTP) against shared data. This offering provides consistent performance, high transaction throughput, and scalability to grow incrementally and smoothly with your business. By using and deploying a solution that is built from the ground up on workload-specific and optimized offerings, you should be able to reduce your costs for that particular workload over time, when compared to addressing the workload with general purpose offerings. Depending on the workload and the volume growth trend, those general purpose offerings might not meet your medium- to longer-term needs.

IBM WebSphere Cluster Transaction Facility has been born out of decades of experience in supporting high-volume, high-value transaction processing against shared data by using IBM System z® (the IT industry standard for mission-critical OLTP), and provides similar capabilities now on IBM Power Systems™. In this IBM Redguide, we explore the unique features and capabilities of this offering and describe the underpinnings regarding why, for shared data transaction processing, this solution is in fact optimized, more efficient, and more scalable than other general purpose approaches.