Osaka Gas optimizes application availability and performance with IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise

The Internet is not only a part of the business environment today, it is a crucial part. Companies such as Osaka Gas, a leading Japanese energy supplier, have come to depend on the Web for hundreds of business-critical applications. Employees buy and sell on the Internet, monitor gas wells and interact with customers. How then does Osaka Gas optimize the performance of its Web applications? What can it do when performance falters, threatening operations enterprise wide? Osaka Gas has struggled with this problem.

Osaka Gas supplies natural gas to 6.7 million customers in the Kansai Region. With its portfolio of diversified energy businesses, Osaka Gas is developing into a multi-energy services provider of natural gas, electricity, LPG, district heating/cooling and other services.

More than 200 Osaka Gas Web applications ran on widely scattered servers powering Web application servers. To consolidate the application servers, the company migrated the applications to IBM System p™ 6 servers in the main data center, deploying the applications within several Java™ Virtual Machines (JVM™s). Approximately 5 – 15 applications ran within each JVM.

Not all the applications performed well, however. Shortages within JDBC connection pools and heap memories caused some applications to falter, forcing administrators to restart individual JVMs. This created a situation in which other applications that had nothing to do with the problem but ran in the same JVMs also timed out, bringing work to a standstill within multiple areas throughout the company.

Making the problem go away

This was a problem for Osaka Gas Information Systems (OGIS) Research Institutes Co., Ltd., an IT services provider for Osaka Gas. Hiroshi Nakauchi, professional IT architect and technical director, OGIS Research Institutes Co., Ltd., approached IBM Japan for a solution.

“When we turned to IBM, our scheduling systems for maintenance of gas meters were down and Osaka gas could not monitor the status of remote Gas Heat Pump cooling systems on a frequent basis,” says Nakauchi. “We had to correct this situation.”

OGIS Research Institutes Co., Ltd. is very much an IBM shop, with a longstanding relationship with IBM Japan for a series of implementations that involved IBM DB2®, IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Tivoli® Workload Scheduler and a wide range of IBM servers.

“We knew that IBM Japan had the skills and technology we needed, so we relied on them exclusively,” says Nakauchi. “They came through for us and helped us solve our problem by implementing WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, which became the solution.”

Better performance, availability through virtualization

By virtualizing the application infrastructure, IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise ensures maximum availability and improves application performance. Working within the n-tier architecture of its Web application infrastructure, OGIS Research Institutes Co., Ltd. positioned the On Demand Router (ODR) of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise between the IBM HTTP servers and the Web application servers so that the ODR could operate as a reverse proxy.

The ODR monitors and provides load balancing for all Web application traffic. If one of the applications is overloading a connection pool or heap memory, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise reacts by raising events or sending e-mail to maintenance persons. In this way, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise balances workloads, monitors application health and performs automatic operations to correct problematic situations.

“We never had this capability before WebSphere Virtual Enterprise,” says Nakauchi. “Once we installed the software, the problem was solved.”

Cutting hardware costs significantly

Not only did WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provide a stable Web environment for Osaka Gas, it also had another important benefit.

“WebSphere Virtual Enterprise understands the behavior of the whole Web environment,” says Nakauchi. “So it gives us the ability to optimize resource planning. We can cut hardware purchasing costs significantly by letting the IBM product do more with less server capacity. IBM helped us realize this kind of value with its detailed knowledge and guidance.”

Doing more to enhance the Web environment

IBM is also providing the Osaka Gas with leading-edge in-memory cache technology. Future implementations may include WebSphere eXtreme Scale to process massive volumes of transactions with extreme efficiency and linear scalability. WebSphere eXtreme Scale operates as an in-memory data grid that dynamically caches, partitions, replicates and manages application data and business logic across multiple servers.

OGIS Research Institutes Co., Ltd. is also considering implementing IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances. These easy-to-deploy network devices simplify, help secure and accelerate XML and Web services deployments while extending companies’ service oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. And OGIS is committed to SOA.

“A well-constructed SOA gives our business much more speed and helps us innovate,” says Nakauchi. “We need people with more T-shaped skills, to use a Gartner term for skills that are both broad and deep, to continue on the path to SOA. IBM is providing new tools and certifications to help us develop these skills for the future.”

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at: www.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/extend/virtualenterprise

For more information on Osaka Gas, visit: www.osakagas.co.jp/indexe.html