Sarvega: Appliance and Embeddable Software Approaches that Address XML Performance Challenges

As XML continues to proliferate on the corporate network, companies increasingly desire approaches that provide capabilities for security, management, process, and data manipulation without degrading overall network performance. As a result, hardware platform vendors are providing solutions that are able to offer substantially higher performance over purely software-based solutions. As a result, companies need new approaches to deal with messages on the network that stress the capabilities of the general purpose hardware and software that now deals with the problem.

Sarvega aims to meet these needs with a family of appliance and OEM-able software solutions that provide wire-speed solutions for XML and Web Services security, transformation, and emerging messaging needs. The company has also recently announced the Sarvega XML Context Router, an XML appliance that provides secure and reliable routing and messaging capabilities for XML at wire speed based on deep content inspection and publish/subscribe messaging.

XML straining network performance, bandwidth

A recent research report from ZapThink LLC estimates that XML traffic will triple on enterprise networks by 2008, accounting for close to 50% of the messages sent. XML messages are bulky and put a strenuous load on network pipes that could impede a company’s deployment of an SOA, said ZapThink senior analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

“The problem is, if you look at the message on the network, it’s huge. These are significant loads and you have to parse each part, do a decryption check, directory check and query the document itself — every single time a message comes in and out,” Schmelzer said. “It’s just killing some networks. For example, if you want security, some can’t afford to do it. Companies have to double their infrastructure, and dedicate more application servers. At some point, it’s going to kill them because this is 1/100th of what traffic will be.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

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.

Sarvega releases new XML processing blade

“This blade is compelling. DataPower can’t do it because they have their own chipset, and other companies can’t do it because they don’t have the [operating system] approach of Sarvega,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink. “It’s unique on the market. It will cause a lot of people to think about the blade approach for XML processing.” Schmelzer says the benefit with blades is that users can have a rack of them and designate any number for XML processing as demand dictates. “What is valuable is the notion of dynamic provisioning,” he says.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Service-oriented hype to meet hard realities

“The issue is that architecture is a best practice,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “The tool set will get you only part of the way. Architecture is a discipline; you don’t get it from a tool. You need to know what services to build, how to build them at the right level of granularity and how to build them loosely coupled.”

“There is still some shakin’ going on,” Schmelzer says about the development of key specifications such as business process, management and reliability. But he notes that the core Web services specifications such as XML, SOAP and WSDL are “pretty mature.”

“Companies should be aware of where the specs are at, but by and large, individual companies don’t implement the spec directly anyway. They look for products,” Schmelzer says. “So companies need to put pressure on the vendors to collaborate and get these specs out.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Web services pose identity management challenges

“The better idea is that you’re really supposed to separate the notion of identity of who you are from the specific system,” said Schmelzer. “You should have an identity that is separate from the portal and the ERP system and the CRM system. But somehow [those applications] have to respect that identity.”

“There is this whole area of enterprise identity management that is really burgeoning because of this context issue,” Schmelzer added.

The key to separating the notion of identity from specific systems is implementing an architecture that supports policy-driven identity management, explained Jason Bloomberg, also a senior analyst with ZapThink.

“You need to have an enterprise-wide sense of who the users are and what they’re entitled to do that cuts across different applications,” Bloomberg said. “And it has to be a way that maintains the policies that apply to those users.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Sarvega router targets value-added Web services

The device could help pave the way for carriers to offer value added networks based on XML, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for ZapThink. Such networks would be an advanced form of the electronic data interchange networks in use today and would facilitate multi-party machine-to-machine communications.

“If you think about the c-marketplace in the 1990s, one of the problems was that you didn’t have the technology base to build multi-party automatic trading infrastructure,” Bloomberg said. “Now you have the key technology pieces to bring that vision to life.”

Electronic trading networks of the past required as long as two years to set up, said Bloomberg. “Now you’re talking about much more agile environments where the service provider’s role is market making, and to provide scalability and bandwidth.”

XML routing has been available in other products that offer additional capabilities, Bloomberg said, but the key advantage of the new Sarvega device is that it is a dedicated product that can provide extra performance for high-volume transactional networks.

Read more at: Broadband Edge

CA Extends Web Services Management Leadership With New Software and Hosted Service

“Companies today have limited visibility into the runtime performance of their increasingly critical Web services,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “CA’s Web Services Performance Index will enable these companies to better monitor and enforce service level agreements with their business partners — thereby ensuring performance and uptime accountability.”

Read more at: Computer Associates Press Release

XML-Acceleration Tools Aim To Speed Web Services-Clogged Networks

“No one argues that XML is the most efficient way of integration,” Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said. “There’s always a tradeoff. You’re gaining effective integration at the expense of network efficiency.”

“What’s going to set (Conformative) apart is the nuts and bolts of the technology,” Schmelzer said. “Can they do it better and faster, and can they market it.

“This is definitely becoming a hot market.”

Read more at: TechWeb

Sarvega adding security appliances to XML lineup

“Chances are that we will see a convergence where performance, security and routing all happen on the same box,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “Right now it is Sarvega and DataPower pulling out ahead.” But he says traditional networking powers such as Cisco and its competitors will get into the competition at some point.

Read more at: NetworkWorld