Almost all financial services organizations are now, or soon will be, deploying applications based on a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to increase business agility, enable efficient access to information and reduce applications development costs. Web Services are distributed, object-oriented programs capable of working together across distributed computing platforms. They offer the enterprises more rapid application development and re-use of existing code. Web Services are allowing financial firms to rely on an SOA that promises tremendous opportunities to build distributed applications for use throughout the organization.

Challenges

 Until recently, applications have generally executed mainly on a server or a cluster of servers. But when applications are written using Web Services, elements of an application can execute on different servers throughout an organization—and all of these disparate elements rely on the ability to communicate with each other. For most financial institutions, it is unlikely all of these disparate elements are at the same physical location. With applications written using Web Services, site-to-site traffic volume grows exponentially and low latency is an increasingly critical network characteristic. Financial firms will have traffic patterns that are less predictable, and high-priority packet identification will become increasingly difficult.

Solution

When application processing is distributed between locations with Web Services, inter-process communications are carried over the network. Since network performance is never at the level of server system bus performance, special care must be taken when integrating Web Services into a business process. Having a distributed network that behaves like a local network, with predictable, deterministic and low latency performance, is essential for capitalizing on the opportunities enabled by Web Services and SOA-based applications.

Ciena's offerings

Increasingly, financial services firms are considering the performance requirements of next-generation distributed applications in today's Wide Area Network (WAN) implementations. Ciena's specialty is high-performance connectivity for such critical applications, and our assured, adaptive network architecture optimizes and switches traffic at the lowest possible layer to provide maximum throughput and the lowest latency. That means a single adaptive network can support distributed Web Services and efficiently and reliably empower a full mix of SOA-based applications across the organization. As a network that is always available, never drops packets and delivers deterministic response, an adaptive network can help financial services firms move beyond overlapping, single-application networks to a more scalable, high-performance network to support high-bandwidth, time-sensitive, mission-critical SOA-based business applications.

Benefits

• Support Web services from multiple physical locations to drive the growth of distributed business applications
• Offer the high-availability levels required for SOA-based applications, with proven five-9s (99.999%) and six-9s (99.9999%) availability in production financial networks
• Provide the flexibility to support distributed Web services without "starving" them for the bandwidth they need across distributed environments
• Minimize latency and maximize throughput, enabling SOA-based applications to execute on distributed servers across the organization
• As opposed to application-aware networks, Ciena's solutions maintain applications transparency so expensive and time-consuming applications tuning and debugging is minimized (not just for the initial deployment, but for every software update, bug fix, service pack, etc.)
• FlexiPort technology provides software-programmable ports that minimize capital expenses and maximize flexibility and scalability