Intalio|n3 Server
Intalio|n³ Server
is a transactional runtime for the execution of business
processes. It is the core component of the Intalio|n³
BPMS and offers reliable, scalable, and secure execution
for business processes that are designed with Intalio|n³
Designer, directed through Intalio|n³
Director, and deployed with Intalio|n³
Projectors.
Intalio|n³ Server is a transactional runtime for the execution of business processes, which has been architected for reliability, scalability, and security. This allows Intalio|n³ Server to be deployed within the most demanding IT environments for supporting the execution of mission-critical business processes.
Reliability—How to reliably deploy mission-critical business processes.
Transactional Integrity—How to ensure the transactional integrity of distributed transactions.
Deployment Validation & Runtime Monitoring—How to ensure that deployed processes are in sync with external systems
Failover—How to ensure high-availability for process execution.
Scalability—How to scalably support very high transaction volumes.
Asynchronous
Execution Model—How to ensure the highest
level of execution performance.
Process Execution Optimization—How
to optimize the execution of business processes at
run time.
Clustering—How
to support load-balancing within a clustering environment.
Security—How
to securely deploy processes across extended value
chains.
Process Firewall—How
to use the BPMS as a process firewall.
Single Sign-On—How
to support user authentication within a distributed
environment.
Policy Projection—How
to support user authorization within a distributed
environment.
Reliability Transactional Integrity
Business processes usually involve distributed transactions
that are executed across multiple databases and applications.
The integrity of such transactions depends upon the
transaction processing capabilities that are offered
by the underlying process execution environment.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server is architected around a native process
transaction engine that supports the execution of
the most complex distributed transactions (short-lived
coordinated transactions as well as long-lived extended
transactions), while leveraging transactional messaging
systems such as IBM WebSphere MQ and TIBCO Rendezvous
TX for transaction processing with heritage systems.
Benefits
Deployment Validation & Runtime Monitoring
The deployment of executable business processes usually
requires integration with a large number of back-end
systems and front-end user interfaces. As a result,
ensuring that all deployed business processes remain
synchronized with constantly evolving IT environments
can quickly become a daunting task, while failing
to do so might compromise the reliability of the overall
architecture.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server implements two advanced mechanisms for
ensuring that all deployed processes remain properly
bound to external process participants: first, a deployment
validation service ensures that all external process
participants that are defined as part of a process
model being deployed are accessible and properly integrated
at the protocol, interface, and security levels.
Second, a runtime monitoring process can be deployed to constantly check the status of external process participants and alert system administrators when any change is made to their configuration that might affect the reliable execution of any deployed business process.
Benefits
Failover
Deploying multiple hardware servers in a clustered
architecture is becoming a truly cost-effective way
to ensure high-availability within mission-critical
transaction processing environments.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server can be deployed on top of a transactional
messaging system such as IBM WebSphere MQ in order
to support failover across multiple hardware servers.
Furthermore, the persistent storage of running process
instances in a parallel relational database management
system such as Oracle Parallel Server and the deployment
of Intalio|n³
Director on top of a J2EE application server
supporting clustering such as BEA WebLogic or IBM
WebSphere offers failover capabilities across all
runtime components of Intalio|n³.
Benefits
Scalability Asynchronous Execution Model
Running processes are usually in idle status during most of their execution lifespan, waiting for some external event to occur before being able to proceed to the next step in their execution. This raises a significant scalability challenge that cannot be overcome by systems that are architected upon a synchronous execution model.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server is internally architected upon an asynchronous
execution model that can handle a very large number
of running process instances in memory and dynamically
switch from one instance to an other based on the
occurence of external events.
Furthermore, Intalio|n³
Server is extended with a connector framework
that offers support for synchronous transactions by
implementing the industry standard IIOP, RMI, RMI-IIOP,
and SOAP protocols.
Additionally, Intalio|n³
Server enables the passivation of running process
instances on a relational database management system,
keeping in memory only the most active process instances,
hence providing virtually unlimited scalability as
to the number of concurrent process instances that
can be handled simultaneously.
Benefits
Process Execution Optimization
Business processes designed by business analysts usually
give priority to business requirements rather than
technical ones, especially with respect to the performance
of their transactional execution. Even though the
collaboration of software engineers can help improve
the design of business processes that must handle
very large transaction volumes, the complexity that
comes with any distributed architecture makes the
development of complex processes a very challenging
exercise from a performance and scalability standpoint.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server embeds a sophisticated process execution
optimizer that takes advantage of the declarativeness
and block-structured model of both BPML and BPEL4WS
in order to dynamically optimize the execution of
running processes which definitions are only partially
optimized at the design level.
Furthermore, Intalio|n³
Server supports the real-time collection of
system metrics at the activity level, including start-time
and complete-time. The resulting process audit trail
is stored in a relational database management system
and is accessible through both a SQL interface and
an XML Query interface, allowing system administrators
to quickly identify bottlenecks that might exist as
part of a process design as well as occur through
the integration with external process participants.
Benefits
Clustering
The deployment of multiple hardware servers within
a clustering architecture is one of the most cost-effective
ways to achieve scalability for high-volume transaction
processing environments.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server can be deployed on top of a transactional
messaging system such as IBM WebSphere MQ in order
to support load-balancing across multiple hardware
servers. Additionally, the persistent storage of running
process instances in a parallel relational database
management system such as Oracle Parallel Server and
the deployment of Intalio|n³
Director on top of a J2EE application server
supporting clustering such as BEA WebLogic or IBM
WebSphere offers load-balancing capabilities across
all runtime components of Intalio|n³.
Furthermore, because both BPML and BPEL4WS support
the design of end-to-end processes made of multiple
processes that can be deployed independently from
each other, the Intalio|n³
Server can transparently take full advantage
of its underlying clustering architecture, without
requiring business analysts and software engineers
to become experts in parallel computing.
Benefits
Security Process Firewall
Traditional entitlement and role-based access control (RBAC) systems are designed upon a permission model that applies at the transaction level. This makes the management of security architectures an extremely time-consuming task when dealing with complex and fast-changing business processes.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server is designed upon a revolutionary process
firewall architecture that allows permissions to be
granted to roles and groups at the process level,
therefore dramatically reducing the overall maintenance
costs of complex process-oriented environments.
Benefits
Single Sign-On
Business processes usually involve the processing
of transactions with back-end systems that have different
authentication mechanisms, as well as interactions
with business users that are registered on different
directory services. This makes the secure deployment
of end-to-end business processes a very complex task
For this reason, Intalio|n³ Server leverages
the single sign-on capabilities offered by the leading
enterprise portals including BEA WebLogic Portal and
IBM WebSphere Portal, while providing native integration
with a wide range of directory services including
LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory, and Novell eDirectory.
Benefits
Policy Projection
Business processes usually involve the processing of transactions with back-end systems that have different entitlement or role-based access control mechanisms. While leading enterprise portals offer single sign-on capabilities for supporting the authentication of users across heterogeneous systems, they usually do not provide similar capabilities from an authorization standpoint.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Server allows the projection of security policies
on a generic role-based access control model that
supports the definition of security policies at the
process level and their transparent binding to existing
transaction-level policies. This dramatically reduces
the cost of integrating an enterprise portal with
multiple large applications such as ERP, CRM, and
SCM systems.
Benefits
