What’s new in WebSphere Application Server v8.5

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Your business requires fast, flexible, and efficient application development solutions paired with leading service-oriented architecture (SOA) runtime environments to succeed in today's dynamic and increasingly competitive marketplace. IBM WebSphere Application Server has provided industry leading solutions for the past 14 years. WebSphere Application Server V8.5 continues that tradition with breakthrough advances in developer productivity and application server resiliency.

WebSphere Application Server is the leading open standards-based application foundation, offering accelerated delivery of innovative applications and unmatched operational efficiency, reliability, administration, security, and control.

Enhancements in V8.5

The new Liberty profile option is a highly composable, fast to start, and ultra-lightweight profile of the application server and is optimized for developer productivity and web application deployment.
Application Edition Management enables interruption-free application rollout. Applications can be upgraded without incurring outages to your end users.
Health Management monitors the status of your application servers and is able to sense and respond to problem areas before end users suffer an outage. Problem areas include increased time spent on garbage collection, excessive request timeouts, excessive response time, excessive memory, and much more.
Intelligent Routing improves business results by ensuring priority are given to business critical applications. Requests are prioritized and routed based upon administrator defined rules.
Dynamic Clustering can dynamically provision and start or stop new instances of application server Java™ Virtual Machines (JVM) based on workload demands. It provides the ability to meet Service Level Agreements when multiple applications compete for resources.
Enterprise Batch Workload support leverages your existing Java online transaction processing (OLTP) infrastructure to support new Java batch workloads. Java batch applications can be executed across multiple Java Enterprise Edition ( Java EE) environments.
IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition V7.0 as an optional pluggable Java Development Kit (JDK).
Web 2.0 and Mobile Toolkit provides an evolution of the previous Feature Pack.
Updated WebSphere Tools bundles provide the "right-fit" tools environment to meet varied development and application needs.

For businesses that need to build, deploy, and manage secure and portable innovative applications that run on a multitude of mobile, server, and desktop systems, WebSphere Application Server is the flexible and efficient SOA application platform of choice.

For administrators and businesses that need better total cost of ownership through management efficiency and performance, the ability to respond quickly to changes in the business, or achieve simplicity and flexibility in evolving to next generation application server environments, WebSphere Application Server V8.5 delivers new Intelligent Management capabilities that extend the traditional application server with technologies such as enhanced resiliency, virtualization, and enterprise level batch processing.

For businesses needing an end-to-end solution, WebSphere offers multiple tooling bundles that provide developer tools to maximize productivity and flexibility in building new applications. The IBM WebSphere Application Server for Developers - Tools Edition for Eclipse provides users with a lightweight desktop development environment to build applications for WebSphere Application Server. Other bundles include an unlimited number of licenses of IBM Rational® Application Developer providing organizations with a complete solution to develop, deliver, and manage high-quality enterprise applications.

Performance Points of WAS v8.5

Up to 4x improved performance moving from WAS V7 to WAS V8.5 and even more when moving from V6.1 to V8.5.**
WAS 8.5 performs up to 70% better than WAS 8.0 measured through SPECjEnterprise 2010
70% better performance on SPECjEnterprise2010 V8.5 than WAS 8.0 on a 12-core Westmere EP server coming from across the board from many components
These WAS 8.5 improvements can significantly help improve the middleware performance on Power 7 Servers as well Significant Performance Improvements across many components through Engineering Efforts;Performance Improvements can be seen in JDK 7.0 , JPA 2.0 Persistence Layer, WebContainer, JSP Engine, EJBContainer, J2C/RRA and Connection Management, Messaging Optimization
New v8.5 Lightweight Liberty profile for quickly developing Web, OSGi & Mobile apps (starts in <5 secs, less than 50mb download)
Improved WAS Migration toolkit to help you move from WAS version to version, or from 3rd party servers (JBoss, Oracle and Tomcat)
First enterprise grade server to offer Java EE 6 Support

WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile

Less than 50MB download
Server startup times less than 5 seconds
Less 50MB memory footprint

IBM WebSphere Application Server is the worldwide performance leader besting Oracle by 16% when compared on equivalent hardware using the industry standard SpecJ benchmark. (3)

** Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput or performance that any user will experience will vary depending upon many factors, including considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user's job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve results similar to those stated here.

Note: SPEC and SPECjEnterprise 2010 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 04/29/2012 Oracle SUN Blade Server X6270 M2 452.285 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010, Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M3 – 519.386 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS (Oracle's best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result so far). IBM HS 22 Blade 524.621 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result)