Tuxedo Emerges As Part Of Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle is integrating the Tuxedo transaction-processing monitor into its Fusion middleware, giving it the ability to deliver Web services and become a full partner in Oracle's approach to service-oriented architecture.

Tuxedo was part of BEA Systems when it was acquired by Oracle last April. Oracle this week issued its first update of Tuxedo, designating it Tuxedo 10g Release 3, a renaming that follows its database-naming convention.

Tuxedo is an online transaction processor that came out of Bell Labs 20 years ago. It became the main alternative to the IBM mainframe for processing transactions and was widely adopted for transaction processing on Unix servers running Cobol, C, and C++ applications. Of the top 10 performers of the TPC-C benchmark, five were powered by Tuxedo as part of the system, with the top one delivering 4.1 million transactions per minute. FedEx, DHL, United Airlines, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse, Best Buy, and Telefonica are among its users.

Tuxedo 10g R3 has been integrated with Oracle's identity and access management and SOA products, illustrating "a substantial commitment and ongoing investment by Oracle. It's more than just keeping Tuxedo on life support," said Mike Piech, senior director of Oracle Fusion, in an interview. Oracle announced the availability of SALT, or Service Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo, which allows Tuxedo 10g R3 to establish a bidirectional gateway to Web services, receiving data updates and dispersing them in response to calls from Web services.

Oracle also announced another Oracle version of Tuxedo, the Tuxedo System and Application Monitor 10g R3 (TSAM), another SOA building block. Both SALT and TSAM have been integrated with the following Fusion middleware products: Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite, and Oracle Coherence, a product for loading frequently used data into multiple servers' memory.

Tuxedo 10g R3 clustering features have been certified to work with Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Real Application Clusters, giving applications served by Tuxedo the ability to continue running, despite failures in the underlying hardware. It also gives Oracle Fusion users the ability to "scale out their applications horizontally" by adding servers to a cluster, Piech said.

Tuxedo maintains a close scan of how many processes are running, how much CPU is being utilized, and how many memory reads and writes are being executed. When this information is combined with Oracle Clusterware, the system "gains the intelligence to know whether we should shift a node from this cluster to another cluster, based on need," said Piech.

The previous release of Tuxedo was issued by BEA Systems as Tuxedo 10 in the fall of 2007.