F5 Networks Delivers Integrated Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0

“F5 Networks continues to make iControl easier to incorporate into development plans by providing deep integration with the most in-demand developer environments such as Visual Studio 2005,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, LLC. “By providing the means by which the applications and services developed with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 can interact with the underlying network, and especially F5 and its iControl API, make it easier for developers to deploy highly available, scaleable, and reliable Web services.”

Read more at: F5 Press Release

Fine-Tuning Of The Internet

“XML smooths things for servers and programmers,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at the research firm ZapThink. “But it puts new strains on the network guys.”

Read more at: Investor’s Business Daily

High Performance and Appliance Approaches for XML

Increasingly organizations are seeking to find solutions that can transparently monitor XML traffic on the network and apply business rules or corporate IT policies such as security, routing, performance, management, transformation, and end-point connection provisioning without adversely impacting network performance or burdening their already over-stretched IT departments.

Because XML traffic is content-oriented, rather than protocol-oriented, solutions responsible for securing XML traffic must make decisions based upon the content of the messages, rather than the protocols that underlie those messages. However, XML is a huge bandwidth, processor, and storage hog. XML processing tasks such as XSL transformation, schema validation, XPath-based classification, XML security, and intelligent routing are inherently processing-intensive, placing a significant burden on server infrastructure that may not be optimized to perform these tasks.

As a result, there is a need for approaches that seek to provide the content-level functionality required of today’s XML and Web Services solutions but also provide the high level of performance needed to effectively run these solutions in production. The result of this need is the evolution of XML appliances, specialized chip-based solutions, and optimized software approaches that aim to ensure XML-related functionality without performance degradation. This report follows the evolution of the XML appliance markets, and the emergence of new classes of solutions dealing with processing XML-based content at wire speed.

Forum Systems and F5 Form Technology Alliance Offering Interoperable Web Services And Traffic Management

According to leading industry analyst firms, companies of all sizes continue to attest that XML and Web services are becoming the dominant model for exchanging information and conducting electronic business transactions. ZapThink, LLC predicts that the Web services security market will be a $4.4 billion industry by 2006. According to market research firm IDC, XML will represent 65% of the total IT security market by 2006. Business and IT managers are now looking at data-level networking to get fine-grained control and visibility of the structured XML data that is moving across their networks and between internal and external applications.

Read more at: HNS

Datapower XS40 XML Security Gateway: Comprehensive XML & Web Services Security on a Hardened Network Device

XML appliances have recently emerged as a category of network device that can address XML and Web Services security and performance issues that traditional network appliances cannot. To properly secure XML traffic, a device must operate on the content of the messages that pass through the network, and take appropriate action on parts of each message.

Clearly, such content-based operations are resource intensive, which is the primary reason for solving such problems on dedicated hardware devices like the DataPower XS40 XML Gateway. DataPower’s XS40 appliance can handle a wide range of XML security, performance, transformation, and routing, functionality, all at wirespeed, in a security hardened appliance that requires little skill to install and administer.

Web services security vendors focus on access control, XML firewalls

That hasn’t changed much, as customers wait for vendors to finalize standards such as XML Key Management Specification (XKMS is for managing the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt Web services messages), says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, an analysis and consulting firm in Waltham, Mass.

Single-point authentication and access control are important because Web services can’t make users more efficient if those users have to enter a new user ID and password each time their request hits another application. “Larger entities might have [10,000, 20,000] or 30,000 users,” says Bloomberg, each of whom might have different access rights on dozens of different systems — access rights that need to be changed, or even withdrawn, as the employee’s responsibilities change or they leave the company.

Major vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. are building Web services security into their broader product platforms. Sun “has leadership in the directory space with their Directory Server,” says Bloomberg, which is the foundation for the Sun ONE Identity Server. Microsoft has also announced plans for a technology code-named “TrustBridge,” which would allow secure authentication of users, and sharing of their user identities across business and security boundaries.

Read more at: SearchWin2000

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Move afoot to speed XML traffic

Lamb’s experience is likely to become the norm. Research firm ZapThink says XML is expected to account for more than 25% of network traffic by 2006, up from just under 2% today. And Forrester says 1 billion clients will be sending and receiving XML messages based on the Simple Object Access Protocol by 2008.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

XML shows promise, but …

Gartner predicts that the amount of XML data in corporations will grow from about 2 percent in 2000 to 60 percent by 2004. Exact numbers are hard to come by though, since, as Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink, an XML research house, says, “XML is so persuasive that it’s already everywhere. Eventually, it will even be in dishwashers.”

Schmelzer comments that “XML is not very efficient from a processing, network, or storage” standpoint, and that its use is growing. By 2006, he says, XML traffic alone may reach 25% of corporate network traffic.

Read more at: The Register and SD Times

F5 Networks Announces DevCentral — An Online Collaborative Resource to Support Fast-Growing iControl Adoption

“F5 DevCentral offers a unique approach in building a developer community by bringing two disparate groups together — network professionals and application developers,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, LLC. “Never before have application developers had the power to manage devices on the network through Web services-based software applications. With iControl and DevCentral, the possibilities are virtually limitless. DevCentral offers a central place for these newly-empowered developers to learn the basics of solutions development and quickly take advantage of the benefits associated with cohesive integration between networks and applications.”

Read more at: Business Wire