Wachovia uses grid technology to speed up apps

15.05.2006
Financial services firm Wachovia Corp. has freed some of its Java-based applications from dedicated servers and is allowing these transaction applications to draw computing power from a 10,000-CPU resource pool on servers spread across cities in the U.S. and in London.

The deployment, the result of a project that began more than a year ago, was announced today by New York-based grid technology vendor DataSynapse Inc., which developed the technology. Wachovia is the first customer to use its FabricServer, which virtualizes transaction applications and enables them to scale across hardware resources as needed.

What Wachovia is doing is broadly similar to what compute grids are intended to do: It is tapping into computing power that's available on other systems to perform work. That capability allows companies to avoid dedicated hardware costs and make better use of underutilized hardware.

Tony Bishop, a Wachovia senior vice president and director of product management, said the alternative - dedicated systems - would be "three times the cost in terms of capital and people to support it otherwise."

Wachovia has eight applications running on its grid that are used in internal transactions such as order management. The applications run in J2EE environments on servers from BEA Systems Inc. and JBoss Inc. The servers are in New York, Philadelphia, London and at the company's corporate headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.

Because the system can provide resources as needed for the applications, Bishop said performance has improved on some transactions from 10msec to 2msec. Bishop, who worked for DataSynapse until he was hired by Wachovia last year, said this ability to speed processing means decisions and services can be made and delivered more rapidly.