Connect and protect your mainframe assets with specialized SOA appliances from IBM
from CCR2, Issue 06 - 2007
CCR2 interviewed Kevin Anderson, IBM WebSphere DataPower product manager, for this feature.
IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances simplify and protect connections to mainframe applications to help you swiftly move SOA projects into production and reduce maintenance. The IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, an easy-to-install, rack-mountable network device, can transform messages between disparate formats – such as legacy, binary, text and XML – and route data between applications with hardened security. These capabilities make the XI50 a cost-effective solution for Web service and SOA enablement of mainframes, high-performance enterprise service buses, and enterprise application integration.
Application connectivity powers dynamic businesses, but over time routine system and application changes significantly increase the complexity of these connections. Often, IT departments find themselves bogged down with complicated application integration tasks involving interdependencies that require expending valuable resources just to keep their IT environments running. A service oriented architecture (SOA) approach sets you on a path to realize more flexible connectivity that accommodates business and IT growth. With SOA, you can harness your time-tested mainframe assets in new ways for greater business advantage.
In SOA environments, an enterprise service bus (ESB), a form of middleware that flexibly connects applications and services, allows IT change with minimal impact by performing the following tasks outside the application code:
- Matching and routing communications between services
- Converting between different transport protocols
- Transforming between different data formats
- Identifying and distributing business events
Middleware and ESBs traditionally have been the domain of software. IBM, for instance, has two software ESB products: IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, which is built on IBM WebSphere Application Server and provides standards-based connectivity, and IBM WebSphere Message Broker for universal connectivity and transformation in heterogeneous software environments.
IBM redefines the boundaries of middleware by extending the IBM SOA Foundation with dedicated hardware – WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances. A purpose-built hardware device with ESB functionality, IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 simplifies SOA deployment and increases security assurance.
In addition, IBM offers two other WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances: IBM WebSphere DataPower XML Security Gateway XS40 to help secure your SOA implementation with XML threat protection and access control, and IBM WebSphere DataPower XML Accelerator XA35 for fast wirespeed XML processing and transformation.
Why an appliance for SOA?
In addition to interapplication message transformation and routing, connecting critical systems to business partners or other departments in SOA environments requires additional service-level monitoring, as well as quality-of-service, security and access control policy enforcement. Hardened, specialized hardware devices help you integrate, secure and accelerate SOA projects by providing essential ESB, SOA management and security functions. By integrating these capabilities in a single device, IBM takes care of your essential SOA requirements right away.
What’s more, higher levels of security assurance often demand hardware solutions. Private key storage is one example. Some government standards, such as Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) level 3, require key storage on tamper-proof chips enclosed in tamper-proof cases. Such a requirement can really only be met in a hardware package. IBM customers increasingly use SOA to connect business critical systems, including mainframes, making secure SOA connections essential. Hardware can also provide acceleration for higher performance connectivity, routing and transformation functions than software.
SOA appliances can address the needs of many different groups within your IT organization. Often, in addition to application and integration architects, a business-centric, enterprise-class SOA project involves network operations, security architects and IT operations. SOA appliances have features, functions and management interfaces that address these groups’ needs.
With an SOA appliance, you can simplify SOA deployment and ongoing management. Reducing the need for in-house SOA skills and know-how can drop barriers and smooth your SOA rollout, so you can quickly start realizing business benefits from your project.
Protect your System z applications
Considering that many companies originally deployed their IBM System z-based applications with the intent that the applications would remain safely ensconced on the mainframe without external access, opening these applications to Web services in an SOA environment introduces many threats the original developers didn’t anticipate.
As a result, when connecting to these siloed applications, many companies must first implement access-control safeguards that can require security expertise and risk-mitigating software development work. With a WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 between your mainframe and other systems, you can simplify your SOA project, accelerate deployment, and secure your implementation.
The XI50 can help you keep your project on schedule and bring it to production fast with minimal changes to back-end systems. For example, a mainframe application that makes IBM WebSphere MQ calls to a client application continues to do so with an SOA appliance, because the appliance looks like an MQ-capable client endpoint to the back-end application. Similarly, a client application that communicates with your mainframe through an SOA appliance sees the appliance as an XML-ready back-end application.
Having an SOA appliance translate between backend and client applications means you won’t need as many IT resources or SOA skills to deploy your project, letting you allocate programmers to other areas. Using a mouse and pull-down menus to configure the SOA appliance, you can be up and running in minutes.
Convenient management and maintenance throughout the devices’ lifecycles help you control your IT operations costs, as well. Because they support Web standards and include extensive interoperability, WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances easily interface with an extensive set of IBM and third-party middleware, SOA infrastructure and security systems, such as IBM Tivoli Access Manager and IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager.
Using an SOA appliance to bridge between your IBM System z platform and the outside world can also simplify connections for your customers and business partners. Rather than making remote COBOL procedure calls to link to your backend applications, external users can connect via industry-standard XML.
Real benefits as seen by clients
Two IBM System z clients serve as examples of SOA appliance benefits. A major financial services company offered new services to its business partners with the help of four IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances – a project that could have required two dozen servers. By simplifying deployment, return on investment for the IBM client was forecasted to break even in the middle of the first year.
Another financial services client used the WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 with WebSphere MQ and System z for a solution that deployed 10 times faster than internally developed custom software, which had grown difficult to modify. The company’s approach reduced overhead costs, speeded fraud-protection processes and produced a solution that was expected result in more error-free deployment of new services.
Find the middleware that’s right for you
Like switches, routers and firewalls that provide convenience and functionality for networking staff, SOA appliances can provide IT with a convenient middleware option that integrates easily with CICS, IMS, DB2 and WebSphere Application Server for z/OS. The WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, for example:
- Connects virtually any commercial IT system with its any-to-any transformation engine.
- Filters and routes messages on the fly based on message content and context. The XI50 can dynamically retrieve routing information, including transport protocol changes, from databases, Web servers, file servers and other information sources for fast updates.
- Bridges protocols, such as hypertext transport protocol (HTTP), IBM WebSphere MQ message format, the Java message service (JMS) API and file transport protocol (FTP), using flexible request-response and synchronous-asynchronous communication styles.
- Fits its configuration approach to you by offering many choices: a Web-based graphical user interface, a command line interface, integration with Eclipse and other IDE environments, and integration with SOAP management environments.
The WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances integrate deeply and broadly across the IBM portfolio. They are ready for IBM Tivoli Access Manager to help you enforce fine-grained access control, IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager to manage Web services identity and policy data between organizations and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA to monitor Web service and SOA traffic flows for end-to-end service management.
IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager System Edition (ITCAM SE) for WebSphere DataPower, a no-charge download, delivers convenient management capabilities for DataPower SOA appliance clusters.
DataPower SOA appliances work with IBM WebSphere MQ, as well as IBM WebSphere Message Broker,, which can auto-configure Web services security mediations. IBM WebSphere Registry and Repository, can help you discover and reuse services and configure new services for DataPower policy and security enforcement. A DataPower SOA appliance can auto-configure its XML firewall by importing IBM WebSphere Application Server, service descriptors.
Most recently, in June IBM announced an update to IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender Design Studio, a data mapping tool for DataPower XI50 transformation between disparate data formats.
Make the most of your System z resources
IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances help simplify, secure and accelerate your SOA deployment. They help you meet today’s increased requirements for IT flexibility and corporate security in a form that is quick to deploy and easy to change.
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