Technical Overview

SynfiniWay is a middleware with which a private enterprise cloud can be created that provides a uniform and global view of resources within a department, a company, or a company with its suppliers. This private cloud is service-oriented, meaning that applications are run as services, which are a system-independent view of applications. A business process consisting of several services can be mapped into a workflow, and data exchange between the services participating in the workflow is implicitly managed by the IT framework. A meta-scheduler decides on which resources the services will be executed. SynfiniWay is platform-independent, allowing almost any distributed heterogeneous platform to be linked into the cloud.

By creating private enterprise clouds, companies optimise their IT resources by letting the meta-scheduler direct services to underutilised resources, standardise their business processes and make them available for engineers, and simplify the management of their IT resources.

Service-Oriented Infrastructure

SynfiniWay is a service-oriented software platform for collaborative computing. The service approach provides an abstraction layer that enables users to build standard business processes that are completely independent from the IT infrastructure layer.

• The complexities of distributed or grid IT infrastructure are hidden
• The business processes are replicable.
• All components of the platform are written in Java™ for maximum portability on Windows®, Linux and UNIX systems.
• SynfiniWay is situated below the end-user layer and above the application, batch system, operating system commands, storage and network operation layers.

A service contains all information needed to define the environment under which an application will run and any user parameters that are needed or allowed for execution of the service.

Workflow Management

A business process or workflow is created in SynfiniWay by linking the services.

• Data dependencies or sequence dependencies are taken into account.
• Conditional branching and loops are supported.
• Workflows can consist of a single application, of multiple applications or of simultaneous parallel chains of applications.
• Almost any business process or activity can be mapped, and then made available to users.

Meta-scheduling

SynfiniWay employs a meta-scheduling capability which optimises workflows by directing the different tasks of a workflow to the best location for execution. The SynfiniWay meta-scheduler is located above the local schedulers, and can dispatch tasks to a mixed set of local resource managers.

• SynfiniWay is designed to provide fully optimised transfer speed for large files and bulk movement of multiple files.
• No staging is used to eliminate overhead and increase security.
• All transfers, whether orchestrated by the business process or by direct user action, are resilient to infrastructure failures.