Why? What is the option?
Usually customers who had made huge investments in IBM hardware would like to go with IBM solutions for Content Management and Portals. These solutions are often expensive, inflexible and hard to maintain. There are many supier Open Source based content management systems, but most of them run only on LAMP stack, they can't be deployed on IBM stack.
Here is the good news for the customers who would like to retain the IBM stack, but still want to leverage benefits of an open source CMS application... Alfresco, the leading Open Source CMS is best suitalbe option. You can set yourself free from proprietary CMS, go with Alfresco and dramatically cut down the cost. Alfresco can be deployed on the IBM hardware and software stack (AIX, DB2, WebSphere). As of now, Alfresco Enterprise Edition is supported on IBM Web Sphere and looks like there are plans to support Alfresco on full IBM stack in future.
We at CIGNEX have done some benchmark tests with Alfresco deployed on IBM infrastructure in a clustered environment.
How will infrastructure look like?
For high availability and redundant environment in an active-active configuration, Alfresco application can be clustered on IBM hardware with AIX based nodes. Nodes can have Web Sphere running with Alfresco deployed on that. Alfresco points to DB2 database (clustered or non clustered). Hence you don't need to move away from the expensive IBM infrastructure that you may have already purchased and you can get all the CMS, DMS and WCM features of Alfresco.
Configuration details
Below is the highlevel configuration detail.
Load testing results
Below is the load testing results on above mentioned configuration.
This proves that Alfresco is capable of fulfilling the requirements of customer having IBM stack and also meets the performance criteria even on a low end server. Overall it gives comfort level to the customers who are considering to migrate to Alfresco CMS.
- By
Vipul Dave,
Senior Consultant, CIGNEX India Office.
