Features and benefits
InfoSphere Streams offers a highly scalable and powerful analytics platform that can handle incredibly high data throughput rates that can range to millions of events or messages per second. Streams has successfully run on clusters that consist of thousands of processor cores. InfoSphere Streams incorporates WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging (LLM) transport technology. The WebSphere MQ LLM technology provides InfiniBand support that can enable applications to handle extremely high data throughput with very low latencies, reduced latency variability, and low central processing unit (CPU) consumption.
InfoSphere Streams offers a highly flexible analytics platform that can not only handle traditional and non-traditional data types such as VoIP, email, audio, video, etc., but also offers a high degree of flexibility in defining very complex and powerful analytics. Streams supports reuse of existing Java or C++ code within the Streams environment.
InfoSphere Streams provides several features that enhance robustness of its runtime environment. These include ability to seamlessly remove or add processor nodes to or from the cluster without impacting any Streams applications. InfoSphere Streams provides near linear scalability by simply increasing the number of nodes in the cluster:
In addition to the cluster based run-time platform, InfoSphere Streams includes the Interactive Development Environment (IDE) known as "Streams Studio". Streams Studio is an Eclipse based tool that supports Streams application development with editors, wizards, application structure graphs, and run-time monitoring for Streams applications.
The new InfoSphere Streams version 2.0 release includes the following:
Enhancements to Streams Processing Language designed to improve productivity and agility
New database support, including Netezza TwinFin, Microsoft SQLServer, and MySQL
Health and metrics monitoring of current system status via an XML-based programmatic interface
Addition of new "composites" capability to increase application modularity to support larger and/or distributed application development teams
More freedom to nest and aggregate data types within a single stream definition
Enhancements in InfoSphere Streams Studio to speed writing, testing, and debugging Streams Processing Language applications
New flexible deployment allows applications to be built on a development cluster and moved into production without recompiling
