Independent, in-depth comparative studies of software solutions are hard to come by, which is why the recent Appvance study on integration platforms has received so much attention. The study is aimed at showing organizations how to best implement top-performing integration platforms, with the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). TIBCO’s integration TCO is 35% lower than JBoss, 20% lower than Oracle, 14% lower than WebMethods, and 10% lower than IBM.
The Appvance study was conducted in a traditional software deployment model where the application stack is either installed on physical hardware or on a virtualized environment. TIBCO manages to reduce TCO even further by addressing the inefficiencies of the traditional virtualization deployment model.
Virtualization to Reduce Infrastructure TCO
Virtualization is the biggest recent advancement in reducing TCO infrastructure for companies. In a nutshell, virtualization is the division of a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. There are some fairly obvious benefits: purchasing less hardware, powering fewer servers, and cooling less equipment, etc. Some not-so-obvious benefits include reduced development and testing time due to segregated environments, shorter time-to-market, and reduced operational costs. That brings us to the next question: Can more be done?
Taking It a Step Further
Virtualization decouples the logical hardware from the physical hardware. TIBCO Silver Fabric allows you to go one step further and decouple the application middleware and operating systems from the logical hardware. Imagine the benefits reaped from building applications using various components on the fly, regardless of operating system, software version, or even underlying infrastructure.
- Upgrades, maintenance, and releases—Virtualized servers may contain several different applications, and finding a suitable downtime to allow for upgrades on each app can be a scheduling headache. Breaking out the components of each application allows you to move them as they are available, rather than waiting for a coinciding downtime window
- Release levels—Development and QA sometimes require different versions of application components to be tested through a life cycle. In a typical virtualized environment, this would require building a separate image for every combination of each component version. Silver Fabric enables building the application on the fly using the component versions necessary for the particular task that is being performed.
- OS agnostic—One of the other advantages Silver Fabric delivers is the ability to deploy the application on different operating systems or even different physical infrastructures. In a simple copy of configurations, systems running on an Intel platform can be moved to a SUN-based system or to the cloud.
By allowing organizations to assemble application stacks when needed, Silver Fabric significantly simplifies system maintenance and provides greater flexibility by delivering a highly elastic application. All this goes to further drive down TCO. Check out the Appvance report to learn more.
