Composite Software Bolsters Scalability, Virtualization

Composite Software has long provided an abstracted data services layer - middleware offering a location-independent, federated source of information from across multiple source systems. With Composite Information Server (CIS) 4.5, an upgrade of the firm's flagship software announced yesterday and shipping this week, the company has introduced Composite Active Cluster, an option that enhances scalability and, thus, the ability to deliver data services in services-oriented architecture (SOA) and high-availability data virtualization environments.

Composite Active Cluster lets firms deploy massively scalable and adaptable clusters so they can ensure continuous availability and foster data reuse. "The clustering approach eliminates all data location dependencies, not only at the source data layer but within our software," explains Bob Eve, vice president of marketing. "That makes it a simple matter to find the data services needed for consuming applications, and you can add whatever resources are needed to meet performance and up-time requirements."

The CIS 4.5 enhancements are aimed at the operations people who have to deploy and configure to meet service-level agreements, software development life cycles and backup-and-recovery failover strategies. The Active Cluster option exploits native "active/active" clustering, which is said to reduce total cost of ownership of the data services layer and improve infrastructure utilization.

"In a four-server cluster, a lot of solutions might have two servers doing the work and two waiting around to take over when bad things happen," explains Eve. "[Active/active] shares the workload across all four clusters, and when bad things happen to one server, the three remaining servers take up the load. It's a much more effective use of resources."

Additional CIS 4.5 product enhancements include improved security management for controlling large groups of enterprise users and expanded data connectivity to Teradata and VSAM, ISAM, IMS and Adabas mainframe data sources. The upgrade also features enhanced XML data type support, HTTP connectivity pooling and user/group export and import. CIS 4.5 and the Composite Active Cluster are sold separately and priced based on the number of CPUs.