ThinkAnalytics

 

Realtime deployment, load balancing & failure recovery

The release of Think Enterprise 8.0 further enhances the Think IES Business Analysis Automation platform with scalability, performance, load balancing, failure recovery, operational robustness and enterpise integration features.

The delivery of real-time analytics and modeling to a business is vital, however, the ability to achieve this and at the same time integrate with strategic technologies within an organization is critical. The ThinkAnalytics Intelligent Enterprise Server provides a range of components to connect the revolutionary data-mining platform to the major CRM and Business Intelligence technologies, improving and automating the decision making processes and protecting technology investments. For example, a call center operator retrieves customer information and an assessment of their value to the business. A personalized product offering based on buying patterns of other customers as well as the individual's customer profile is produced and the result is an instant cross-sell opportunity.

The following diagram shows the relationship between Think Enterprise and Think IES, along with a variety of example operational applications that would benefit from incorporating the predictive analytics functionality provided by Think Enterprise and Think IES:

 

Think Enterprise Integration

Think Enterprise provides a simplified interface for embedding Think Intelligent Enterprise Server (Think IES) plans into applications that require real-time analytic functionality. Think Enterprise allows plans to be used as resources that provide an application with real time, analytical functionality via service requests.

The functionality to handle sending the request to the plan and to receive a reply is managed by Think Enterprise, as is the functionality to manage the plans, ensuring they are available for use and to distribute the load on the plans.

The application client uses a simple Java interface to build requests to send to Think Enterprise. This can be done from within a J2EE container for example. These requests are sent to the Think Enterprise Server. This server controls and communicates with a set of plans running within one or more Think IES servers. The application client does not communicate directly with the Think IES plan.

The Think Enterprise Server is configured using an XML file, which describes the Think IES servers to use, the plans that are to be set up as resources, and also how to control the plan lifecycles. While handling a service request, a plan within Think IES is being used exclusively for that one request. In most cases the request will take only a short time. Nevertheless, plans are configured as pools of resources, so there will be multiple Think IES plans of the same type running, handling requests for the application.

Regardless of the way that Think Enterprise handles a plan, the client interface is the same. The Think Enterprise configuration for the plan type is what determines how the plan is handled by the Think Enterprise Server.

Functionality

Listed below is some of the functionality of Think Enterprise:

• The Think Enterprise architecture has been added to simplify real-time deployments, provide enhanced resilience, load balancing and failure recovery.

• Think Enterprise supports a Java Connector Architecture (JCA) adapter for access from EJB containers.

• Web Service interface is provided to call external Web Services and call Think IES as a Web Service itself.

• The client transparently uses many Think IES servers on many machines. This allows the system to scale up and down as required.

• Automatically load balances over the available Think IES servers, by allocating from the pool of available resources.

• Think IES servers within an application can be managed individually (via a JMX interface), to restart them for example.

• Applications are transparently distributed over several servers, and these can be managed separately

• The client does not have to restart tasks if they fail - they are restarted automatically.
  

• Think Enterprise and the plans being run within it can be managed via a Java Management Extensions (JMX) interface. This standard management interface allows Think Enterprise to fit into system management architectures. Think Enterprise actions can also be scheduled to happen at certain times, so for example a plan could be run on a weekly basis to rebuild a model, and then the resource plans could be made to use this new model.