WebSphere Application Accelerator for Public Networks

WebSphere Application Accelerator for Public Networks (WAXPN) is the first IBM product offering from the Akamai Ready initiative. WAXPN combines many capabilities of the Akamai Web Application Accelerator and, when used with WebSphere DataPower service-oriented architecture (SOA) appliances, delivers configurable end-to-end optimization, acceleration, security and management from the enterprise through the Internet to the end-user.

WebSphere Application Accelerator for Public Networks transport optimizations result in dramatic reduction in effective round trips taken over the Internet—further improved by a SureRoute service, providing constant measurements that find the fastest and most reliable routes, enhancing these benefits:

• Global users experience local response times, regardless of their distance from infrastructure
• Higher application adoption
• Promotion of data center consolidation
• End-user response time improvements of up to five times

Akamai also greatly improves server scale within the data center by addressing bottlenecks outside of it:

• Static content can be offloaded out of the data center through caching.
• Offloading capabilities reduce the bandwidth needed to support your application and when combined with the Akamai Protocol, result in a dramatic reduction in server hits.

With adaptive monitoring of data center resources, WebSphere DataPower appliances add a new layer of intelligence to the acceleration capabilities of the Akamai solution.

During spikes of activity, users will still enjoy a fast response time with information fed from the Akamai cache. As the backend workload decreases, the caching duration of dynamic data is decreased improving application availability and responsiveness.

By leveraging the adaptive load optimization, WebSphere Application Accelerator for Public Networks (WXAPN) provides improved protection against DDoS attacks. Since the Akamai network is built to absorb DDoS at its edge, WebSphere DataPower appliances can dynamically increase cache setting timeouts for all content—including that which is normally dynamic such as banking sites and blogs.

The Akamai network of thousands of servers in over 1,000 datacenters provides a capacity that absorbs withering traffic surges. Encrypted authentication mechanisms help protect the distributed network from unauthorized traffic. In addition, a security-enhanced handshake between the Akamai network helps ensure that only traffic carried over the Akamai network reaches the application infrastructure—extending the security perimeter into the cloud and protecting the server upon which your application resides from external threats.

WAXPN's tighter cloud security features include:

• Prefetching - Reduces the number of long-haul round trips and total time required to retrieve embedded content, eliminating a major source of latency for page rendering.
• Transport protocol optimization - Tunes the parameters that govern communications between servers - and between servers and users - in order to increase the performance of those connections.
• Compression - Effectively reduces transfer times for HTML content sent to users on slower connections by improving performance of transactional content.
• Cache optimization - Provides a cache control feature to set the cacheability of content.
• One SSL certificate (either single host or wildcard) is included for exclusive use with this offering.

The WAXPN management portal provides a convenient web-based portal interface with advanced reporting capabilities for customers to monitor and customize their services, which include:

• Page views per second
• Dynamic route optimization
• Error reporting
• Traffic handling (hits/sec)
• Performance monitoring tool