Introduction to IBM InfoSphere Information Services Director

You can more easily create business processes with information from a complex, heterogeneous environment if that information is published as consistent and reusable services.

Information integration is a key part of creating services with IBM® InfoSphere® Information Server. IBM InfoSphere Information Services Director allows units from any of the suite components to be deployed as Web services or Enterprise Java™ Beans (EJBs) in minutes. IBM InfoSphere Information Services Director load balances service requests across multiple InfoSphere Information Server nodes, to ensure smooth pickup of load spikes, and to ensure fault tolerance and high availability. It provides the following key capabilities:

Packaging information integration logic as services that insulate developers from underlying sources
Allowing these services to be invoked as EJBs or Web services
Using the JMS transport method for asynchronous access to service responses
Providing load balancing and fault tolerance for requests across multiple servers
Providing foundation infrastructure for information services

The extensible architecture of InfoSphere Information Services Director allows it to enable a broad range of information management tasks such as data cleansing, data transformation, and data federation services.

Infrastructure services

InfoSphere Information Services Director is deployed on a J2EE-based service backbone that provides flexible, distributable and configurable interconnections among the many parts of the architecture. These infrastructure services include:

Security services: Support role-based authentication of users, access-control services and encryption appropriate for compliance with many privacy and security regulations.
Load balancing and availability services: Support routing requests to multiple servers to provide optimal loading and a high availability environment that can recover from any individual server failure.