WebSphere network deployment

Guidewire certifies the base version of WebSphere, but supports WebSphere Network Deployment (ND). Guidewire products do not require any ND functionality to run. Some IBM terminology conflicts with Guidewire terminology, for example:

Guidewire Cache Coherency for Clustering

PolicyCenter provides cache coherency to support clustering by maintaining an internal cache of objects for performance reasons. The Guidewire implementation of clustering for cache coherency is completely independent of the application server.

WebSphere ND Clustering

Clustering provided by WebSphere ND is different from PolicyCenter cache coherency. WebSphere ND clustering is mostly about session replication, which is the capability to constantly maintain a user’s session state across multiple computers in a cluster. Maintaining session state information is useful in the event of failover, in which WebSphere transfers a user from one server to another. This functionality was intended to support lightweight session objects such as those found in online shopping carts. Because Guidewire designed PolicyCenter for enterprise users, each session must preserve a large volume of data. As a result, session replication is prohibitively performance intensive and Guidewire does not support it.

WebSphere ND provides the following features that you can use in conjunction with PolicyCenter:

Deployment

WebSphere ND includes tools for automatically deploying configurations to servers in a cluster. Guidewire supports these tools if used in conjunction with Guidewire Environment Specific Configuration settings.

Load balancing

WebSphere ND provides load balancing capabilities. See Load balancers and Guidewire applications.