What is Scalability?

February 5, 2007   8:58

Your system might work flawlessly at the beginning, but when the usage increases, the system resources will be stressed more and more causing your system to become slower. If the load becomes to high your solution might even start to produce error messages and it’s really time to expand your system.

If we need to expand our system to meet our business needs we are talking about scalability. We can expand by adding extra hardware, like extra servers, or by upgrading the existing hardware, like adding extra hard drives or CPU power. Note that we are not talking about optimizing our application’s software.

If we take a look at BizTalk Server we talk about scalability when we want to scale BizTalk to increase our throughput or if we want to reduce latency times. The BizTalk Server architecture enables us to scale-up and to scale-out.

• Scaling-out
  Adding extra hardware to our environment like servers to spread the work load. We can double the throughput by adding an identical server.
• Scaling-up
  Of course we can keep the solution inside the same box. We might try to improve our system by upgrading from a single-core CPU system to a dual-core CPU.

MSDN provides an useful piece of documentation on the situations and ways we can scale BizTalk.

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What is BPEL?

January 29, 2007   21:33

Today I had to answer some questions that involved BPEL. So what is BPEL?

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language. When we connect the systems of two or more organizations, it might be useful or even necessary to know something about the business process from each company.

There are “easy” ways to share business process information between Business Process Management (BPM) systems when they are created by the same vendor. For example, with BizTalk Server 2006 you can use the Trading Partner Management technology to exchange this information. However, in real life, most companies use systems from different vendors.

To allow insight in each other Business processes Microsoft, IBM and others have created the BPEL language. The language is particularly useful to describe and sharing externally visible parts of a business process. BPEL is an Orchestration language which is built entirely on Web services. Inside BizTalk it is possible to export business processes that are designed with the Orchestration Designer into BPEL.

BPEL isn’t a complete language for defining business processes. For that reason it is hard to view it as a fully mature technology, but of course it keeps evolving. A more thorough explanation of BPEL can be found here.

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