1. Compelling Events for Automation
• Middleware Upgrades It’s great when new vendors
bring out new features - but often taking advantage of
them takes a good deal of time and effort to upgrade
the new infrastructure - and introduces risk. Automating
the upgrade project speeds it up, reduces the risk and
builds a more manageable platform in the future.
• Migrating off ‘Premium Product’ With the economy
as it is, more organizations are forced to tighten their
belts, and one area that has come under particular
scrutiny is the annual cost of maintaining installed
software. Some organizations have made the decision
to move less business critical applications off more
expensive middleware onto open-source platforms
such as JBoss and Tomcat. This type of project is
accelerated when it’s automated and an automation
tool makes managing hybrid or heterogeneous
environments much easier.
• Building a PAAS or a private cloud With pressure
on businesses to deliver more innovation to their
customers, faster, we see many of our customers
building Platforms As A Service and private clouds.
These are a lot faster and quicker to set up using an
automation tool, and a lot quicker to manage demand
once they are up and running.
• Core business application upgrades or migrations
Many of our customers occasionally need to upgrade
or even replace their core business applications - often
complex, multi-layered, integrated systems that have
evolved over time and have many integration points
and are absolutely critical to the minute by minute
operations of the business. Using an automation tool
can reduce the risk and time associated with such
a project.
• Platform migrations Sometimes it’s time to move
from one platform to another - for instance, customers
sometimes feel that a UNIX based platform will
offer them performance advantages over an OS400
platform. But moving hundreds of middleware
applications might seem like a challenge too far -
without automation.
WebSphere Message Broker Insights
• Managing WebSphere Message Broker is often
a manual task, requiring an army of skilled WMB
administrators to manually configure many
disparate WMB configurations which are often
quite heterogeneous between environments.
Configuration changes, made manually,
can easily be misapplied, omitted, lost or be
dependent on deep technical knowledge and
historical perspective on specific environments
that only exist in individual’s heads.
• The RapidDeploy™ WebSphere Message Broker
plugin allows you to manage WMB configurations
centrally in an SCM tool and deploy changes
just as you would code. You can snapshot a
(Development or “Golden”) WMB configuration,
template it (make it environment neutral) and
use data dictionary items to apply environment
specific settings at deployment time. Changes
will never again be misapplied, forgotten, lost or
omitted. The historical and technical perspective
of why an environment was built in a particular
way over time is now maintained in the SCM tool,
and not in individual’s heads.
• The plugin allows you to reverse change
(backout) back to a known good configuration. In
fact you can move forwards and back through the
retained list of historical versions as often as is
required for any or all of your environments.
• The plugin also allows you to take point in time
snapshots of WMB environment configuration
for comparison over time to measure and control
configuration drift.
MidVision Extension to the IBM Rational
Automation Framework: WebSphere Message Broker
MidVision Extensions extend the target platforms of the IBM Rational Automation
Framework which provides organisations with Application Release Automation capabilities
to reduce costs, improve productivity and time to value and assure compliance. This
datasheet refers to the MidVision Extension for WebSphere Message Broker.
MidVisionExtensiontoIBMRAF
