Has anyone herd of Cell Clustering in ND WebSphere Application? We have a contractor that is touting this to management. If you have can you please share any document links on the subject?

Thanks in advance.

Tony,
I've never heard of "Cell Clustering" previously.  In fact, I can't recall ever having come across this in any of the redbooks either...

Do you have any context for the phrase?  Perhaps some great new advantage they are claiming?  

Best yet, do they have a whitepaper, technical document, topology diagram, etc about this?

Thanks,     
Erik

Erik

Thanks for your comments and I to have spent considerable time looking for this in a red book or white pager. This is a contractor that states he has seen it and has convinced our management that we should implement it. We are getting ready to contact IBM directly on this just wanted to see if anyone in the forums have seen it.

Can you get the consultant to elaborate on what is meant by "Cell Cluster"? If they imply a true Websphere ND cluster of *federated*, centrally managed application servers, that makes no sense. On the other hand I have come across the concept of a Websphere "Super cluster". I believe that to be a runtime thing handled by routing requests across cells and not an administrative thing. I assume deployments and configuration etc. would still have to be handled independently for each cell (maybe the job manager could help out here). Google "Websphere Super cluster". There are a couple of developer works articles out there that may shed some light.

John

I took my own advice and scaned the developer works articles. Even that seems to be done with multiple clusters within a single cell. Let us know where you end up with this. Interesting.

www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/tec...

Any time Tony.

I'm familiar with the concept of multiple cells running the same app, but they aren't clustered at a cell level by any means, as Johnn has called out.

Fundamentally, why is the consultant pitching this concept?  I'm trying to understand what they're referring to but their phrase just doesn't make sense.

Thanks,
Erik

Thanks guys for your input. This consultant is try to get a maintenance contract for a product they developed and wanting to add administration of our WebSphere environments to it. To do this they are trying to scare management by telling them that we don’t have a stable, secure, or redundant environment and brings up the Cell Cluster. We admins just had a chance to sit with the consultant and the concept he is talking about is a same that John mentioned and his lack of understanding of WebSphere came to light. We also had our regional IBM WebSphere rep come in with a WebSphere engineer that has also address this with the management team and assured  them that we are doing business as the product is designed, its secure, stable, and is designed so that its redundant or HA.

Thanks for all of your help and sorry to drag you into this and I’m still trying to figure out why we had to go thru this process since we have a annual IRS audit that involves auditing all the issues that this consultant stated we fell short on.