Big firms seek share of server market

By ADAM GIFFORD

We've had the database war and the battle over web servers. Prepare now for a fight for territory among application server vendors.

Dr Kevin McIsaac, a senior analyst with international IT research firm Meta Group, believes organisations that harness the power of application servers can bring down their software development and hardware costs, while having powerful, robust applications.

"Over the next five years you will find the application server becoming the centre of your development effort," Dr McIsaac told a seminar in Auckland organised by software development toolmaker Borland.

An application server is the part of the computer system that performs the business logic or data processing.

In an "n-tier" environment, the application server sits with or between the web server and the databases and legacy applications, providing the middleware glue to allow browser-based applications to link to multiple sources of information.

The big names in the field are BEA's Weblogic, IBM's Websphere, Borland AppServer and the Netscape or iPlanet Application Server.

Dr McIsaac said software developers must be able to build quickly applications that can deal with huge scale increases and huge spikes.

And instead of just building for customers within an organisation, they must now create systems that allow outside partners and customers access to things such as inventories, prices and schedules.

The two-tier client-server architecture that replaced mainframe computing was good for building applications quickly, but it did not scale geographically - the network could not reach far from the server. Now the drive is on to separate the database layer, the application server and the presentation layer.

Dr McIsaac said that in n-tier architecture, the database tier was used just to store data, "so we move away from things like stored procedures in the database." In recent years web designers have tried to put business logic on web servers, but Dr McIsaac said that had just repeated the shortcomings of two-tier architecture.

Many organisations now put their web server layer on "stateless farms."

Instead of using big Unix servers or server clusters to serve up pages, they have racks of relatively cheap "pizza box" size Intel servers running Windows 2000 or Linux.

The servers are stateless rather than clustered - they do not know what is happening on their neighbouring servers.

"The beauty of this is because with HTTP protocol browsers, if a server fails, who cares. The load balance router finds another server."

He said five Windows NT Machines, each rated at 95 per cent availability, connected with load balancing would guarantee a system to be up 99.99 per cent of the time.

"The other advantage is as workload increases, you just put more machines into the rack."

The architecture would work only where the applications could do the load balancing, which means they need to be built on top of a robust application server.

It is also now possible to build middle-tier farms with very high availability from two-processor machines running Windows NT or Linux.

The only area where "big iron" is still needed is the database, which many organisations run on medium-sized computers capable of SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing).

"Watch where the vendors go, though. In three years back-end databases will be clustered on low-end Wintel or Lintel machines (Windows or Linux operating systems on Intel chips)."

Dr McIsaac said evidence of the trend came from netcraft.com, which "pinged" more than 20 million organisations to find out what sort of servers were running SSL (secure socket layer), a protocol developed by Netscape for sites running commercial applications.

"In terms of real e-commerce, over 50 per cent of sites are using Microsoft IIS (internet information server) as the web server, with Apache a close second. The reason is web servers are a commodity, and Microsoft is the leader in commodity software."

As the underlying operating system becomes less important, the benefits of Unix go away and organisations will buy cheaper Intel hardware.

Dr McIsaac said traditional hardware vendors such as IBM, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems all realised that and were making major plays in the application server market.

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