The first wave of integrating storage, computing, and networking hardware helped businesses move from client/server to Internet-based peer-to-peer networks. A second wave of integrating applications on top of the hardware infrastructure promised to deliver unprecedented economies of scale. In today's enterprise IT model, applications exposed as services need to be integrated seamlessly with other applications distributed across the network to generate the best operational efficiencies. Messaging-oriented middleware is at the heart of enabling seamless or 'effortless' integration between a business's core assets: its applications and data residing on the network.
There is a class of data, including messages and business workflow state, for which conventional monolithic databases are less than ideal. Performance and scalability of Application Server systems can be dramatically increased by distributing such data across transactional filestores, each of which is bound to a server instance in a cluster. This paper describes a high-performance, transactional filestore that has been developed for the BEA WebLogic Application ServerTM and benchmarks it against a database. The filestore uses a novel, platform-independent disk scheduling algorithm to minimize the latency of small, synchronous writes to disk.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1066269 (ACM registration required)