There is an almost endless need for security as the attack of all sorts of criminal hackers and hordes continues. Authorities on network/computer administration say that centralized management of a company’s computers is the key. Clearly that is true, you hire the best and brightest to manage and develop policies for how your companies IT systems will be operated, then that central team makes sure the policies are maintained. There is a solution that is Java based which you will find very helpful in this regard, it is called Iron-Admin and it is gaining popularity.

Centralized Management

One of the major hurdles with centralized management of computers is the software aspect. Having a secure means of administering a WAN from your central office is needed. You will find Iron-Admin made by Wise Firm (www.WiseFirm.com)  to be outstanding for centralized management, another product is WebMin (www.WebMin.com) which is specific to Linux servers only. For larger corporations who maintain Microsoft, IBM, Solaris, and other OS servers, the only choice would be Wise Firm’s product called Iron-Admin. It uses 256bit encryption for all communication, which is double that of WebMin.

With Unix based servers the legacy method of administering your network was to use X Windows terminals, or just an SSH shell session and commands. And with Microsoft Windows you have the Active Directory which allows WAN administration using a simple GUI tool. The problems you face with both of these legacy systems is that various server side software, such as DNS, eMail, Web Servers, etc. require you to learn the GUI of each of these software packages. On top of that you are often dealing with multiple OS systems with various designs, and Solaris doesn’t work the same as AIX, likewise Linux is not the same as MS Windows Server. Wise Firm’s Iron-Admin system solves all of this, providing a uniform way to administer all of the OS systems and the server software that runs on them.

Iron-Admin’s Universal GUI

The Iron-Admin product provides a powerful GUI with centralized control of all servers on your WAN or LAN. The GUI is more advanced then Microsoft’s Active Directory MMU tool. And the GUI appearance and operation is the same rather you are administering an AIX server, Solaris, Windows 2003, or Windows Vista. Iron-
Admin is actually not just an administration system, actually it ships with many server components and when you install it you actually get a powerful eMail server, Backup server, DNS server, J2EE server, Samba/Windows server, and other components. So Iron-Admin is kind of an administration system and server system all in one with a universal GUI to manage everything. Here’s a GUI snapshot of what it looks like…

Integrating Multi-Platforms

Another common need is to integrate various platforms, or OS systems of different flavors. Again Iron-Admin fills the need by offering cross-platform file management and backup. From one computer console you can copy and move or backup files from multiple computers across a large WAN. For instance you could select files and directories from an AIX server in California, then select some more files from a Solaris 10 workstation in Dallas, then select some more files and directories from a MS Windows 2003 server in Kansas, and then copy all of them from all those computers to a single destination Linux server in Florida! That sounds amazing right, will I have done just such things with Iron-Admin, and it is as easy as using the MS Explorer or the Linux File Browser. You can do more then just copy them however, you can select files and directories as stated and instead of just copying them, you can burn them all to a DVD on a destination computer, or just schedule a regular automated backup from all of those computers to a destination computer. Integration stretches to easy click and linking of NFS shares across platforms too, as well as ADS file shares between Linux and Windows servers and workstations.

There are actually too many features to mention in Iron-Admin, you really should go to www.WiseFirm.com and get into their online Forums, they are very helpful. They also have other products, including free encryption software, free benchmarking software, and eBooks which are very helpful. Wise Firm has really expanded on the capabilities of Java, they offer an unlimited-strength encryption system with Iron-Admin which apparently could do like 5000-bit encryption, WOW!

Do you need to make a good decision on what Java EE application server to use for your organization? Sure, and there are a lot of choices out their. I have used Java application servers for years my self, and total there are actually about 9 different JEE application servers on the market that I know of. Open-source Java EE servers are used as much as the commercial counterparts and I believe the only advantage of going commercial is that you may get better security that way. Though certain commercial JEE servers have proprietary features which are valuable, the same can be said of open-source available features.

The servers we will look at are Sun Microsystems open-source Glassfish 2.0, Red Hat’s open-source JBoss 4.2, IBM’s open-source WebSphere 2.0 Community Edition, and BEA’s commercial WebLogic 10. I'm covering JBoss 4.2 due to it's popularity, though it is only partially JEE 5 compliant. I will do benchmarks using a standard benchmark tool from WiseFirm.com. All of these servers and the benchmarks are being run on the same computer and on the same Linux OS, so the benchmarks are a very good demonstration of how these servers truly compare on performance.

Features Comparison…

Below is a quick table on the major features of importance available with our four JEE servers, these features are the standards used in the industry. The table shows a "Yes" if the feature is shipped with the JEE server package standardly, the table shows "Available" if the feature requires additional package installs, and the "Partial" marks a feature that the particular JEE server does not fully support...

Benchmark Comparison...

I used a really nice tool for benchmarking called jRealBench (www.WiseFirm.com gives it free). This tool is designed to show realistic benchmarks, it uses a simple Java .war application that you deploy on your J2EE server, then you specify how many session hits you want to benchmark and just click the Benchmark button. It keeps a database of all the computers you benchmark and allows you to do a chart comparison of them. Here are the results of our four servers all run on the same x64 Dual-core server, this benchmark is based on a 10,000 session test...

There are two tests done in the benchmark charts above, the left test is initial session creation which is when a user first hits your web site application, the right side bars are session re-hit benchmarks which is when the same user accesses another page in your web application. Just in case you have any trouble reading the server names, the blue-bar is JBoss, the green-bar is WebSphere, the first red-bar is Glassfish, and the right-hand red-bar is Weblogic.

This test does not simply check the maximum number of sessions that can be run on these J2EE servers, this is a more realistic benchmark comparable to a production web application. A previous article I did showed that many J2EE servers will run over 1.2 million concurrent sessions, and that is only limited by RAM availability on the server from my knowledge.

Many people have stated that Glassfish is faster then these other servers, but I ran these benchmarks again and again and could not get Glassfish to outperform the others. As you can see Glassfish benchmarked slower then 2 of the other servers, and Weblogic was the slowest of all. WebSphere 2 CE is the same as Geronimo 2, it is based on the Tomcat 6 servlet container, and clearly outperforms all of these other J2EE servers. WebSphere (Geronimo) is the fastest J2EE server I know of.

The Bottom Line...

Saving money and getting the best performance and product for the buck is what we all need. Websphere 2.0 CE (Geronimo) is supported by at least as many people as JBoss 4.x is, and Websphere outperforms all of these other J2EE servers. Red Hat's JBoss and BEA Weblogic have commercial support, while Websphere CE and Glassfish are primarily open-source products. You will pay more for the commercial support but rather you end up in better shoes for that is your decision.

As far as J2EE version 5 compatibility and features are concerned, all of these servers are JEE 5 compatible except JBoss 4.x. Red Hat is releasing JBoss 5 soon and that will be JEE 5 compliant and probably perform better, but I don't think it will perform better then Websphere/Geronimo noticeably, though we will just have to see. On the matter of features overall, the most popular JEE components fortunately are very cross-platform compatible so most servers support them.