As of the end of September 2013 IBM® will no longer offer support on WebSphere® Application Server 6.1. This means that you have two options; lose extended support on your WebSphere Application Server or migrate to WAS v8.x.
With WAS v8.x you will experience a number of upgrades along with additions to the application. You won’t just get an updated version of the application, you will also keep your costs down by avoiding support extensions and running your applications on an unsupported environment.
Not only does WAS 8.x have significant performance, productivity and security features, but it also allows you to take advantage of the additional 7 years of development and resulting capabilities driven into WAS since v6.1 was released. In addition, WAS v8.x allows you to take advantage of virtualization, web, mobile and cloud capabilities.
WAS v8.x has the highest performing foundation (Application Server) for dynamic, interconnected business processes and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). You will also have the ability to manage large topologies asynchronously to standalone app servers or entire cells (WAS ND Job Manager and new WAS ND Liberty Collective Cluster Controller in v8.5.5).
There is not defined path that fits all migrations. Your decision to migrate should be based on three factors. One being that the versions involved in the customer migration scenario, moving from v6.1 to v8.5 would be different than v6.1 to v7.0. Two, the amount of change introduced in and between these versions. Moving from WAS v6.1 to v8.5 involves changes introduced by v7.0, v8.0 and v.8.5. And lastly, dependencies on third-party frameworks and libraries. Some frameworks/libraries are JRE-specific or unsupported on newer JREs, some libraries are now IN the JRE and can cause class collisions (Axis2/JAX-WS).
The best part about all of this is that TxMQ can help with your migration. TxMQ has experience with migrations (AIX, Linux, Windows, zOS), with systems evaluations and HealthChecks available too.
If you aren’t ready to switch just yet TxMQ can help with that too. We offer a remote support solution with ticketed handling of out of support WAS v6.1 issues by certified WAS technical Experts. This includes issue analysis, diagnosis, resolutions communication, infrastructure support and supplements internal teams with proactive maintenance services, consulting, training and problem resolution.
For more information please contact Miles Roty miles@txmq.com.
