This article talks about how WebSphere Edge Server can be used with Lotus Connections deployments to improve the performance and availability of applications is a real world production deployments. The purpose here is not to describe the full capability, configuration or setup of Edge Server but to convey to an administration the usefulness of setting up an Edge Server to improve the performance and available of a production Lotus Connections deployment. Based on how the Edge Servers are deployed, they can help improve the application page response of Lotus Connections deployments for the global user, reduce network congestion and bandwidth requirements.
What is WebSphere Edge Server?
WebSphere Edge server or now called Edge Components of WebSphere Application Server in Version 6.1 is server software consisting of two different components. 1. Load Balancer Server and 2. Caching Proxy Server. High volume websites looking for high availability and performance deploy the server software in production environments as front-end infrastructure.
Load Balancer Server: As the name indicates load balancers are mainly used to distribute web traffic and load to backend web servers. This is achieved by groups together web servers into groups called clusters. By defining these clusters, load balancers can distribute traffic to the different clusters members (web servers) based on a number of sophisticated rules.
Load Balancers located at the edge of the network (close to the users) can direct network traffic, reduce
congestion an d balance the load. They also help to provide site selection, workload management, session affinity and transparent failover.
Caching Proxy Server is a proxy Server which can be used to cache content from backend web and/or application servers. Besides acting a caching proxy server it has a number of other capabilities for securing content, unifying URL namespaces, fancy URLs, redirecting URL etc. For the sake of this discussion we will focus its use only as a reverse proxy server caching content.
Note: The load balancer and caching proxy servers can be installed on the same physical server box or on separate boxes.
For high availability it is suggested that you have two servers as a Load Balancer – One primary and the other Secondary (hot-standby) to backup the primary in case of a failure.It is also recommended that you have at-least two caching proxy servers to avoid a single point of failure.
WebSphere Edge Server in Lotus Connections deployments.
Reference
WebSphere Edge Server Infocenter ->
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.edge.doc/welcome.html