Three IBM ESBs for System z: Faster deployment, easier integration, higher performance
from CCR2, Issue 12 - 2007
|
The following IBM experts were interviewed for this article:
|
Anthony O’Dowd
Architect and strategist
IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS
|
Peter Johnson
Senior inventor
IBM WebSphere ESB for z/OS
|
|
And Gari Singh (not shown), product manager, IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances
|
|
This article looks at the recent enhancements in IBM WebSphere Message Broker, IBM WebSphere ESB and IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 that let you build a scalable and high performance, secure and federated ESB wherever you are on the Smart SOA continuum.
|
A new class of truly agile organizations is forging cohesive IT and business strategies involving service oriented architecture (SOA) and innovative business models. These companies can easily switch business partnerships and rework internal processes to better meet changing market opportunities, because their underlying IT frameworks are robust, flexible, secure and globally integrated.
Maintaining integrity across a highly-distributed SOA process is a more complex challenge than on a single, closed system or tightly-coupled systems. Yet these businesses have conquered the three key components of process integrity – transactional integrity, information integrity and human interaction integrity – to reach the same mission-critical service levels you’d expect from processes supported by traditional IT systems.
And so they’re well on their journey within the Smart SOA continuum. SOA allows organizations to update and re-orchestrate business processes to meet changing market conditions – without rebuilding their systems. The most successful organizations implement SOA with a focus on business value and use-tested and proven techniques. They work smarter.
IBM’s Smart SOA continuum is not a maturity model. There is neither a starting point nor a destination. Instead, there is distinct value at every path, regardless of where you choose to engage (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Smart SOA delivers distinct value with every style regardless of where you choose to engage.
IBM ESBs deliver transactional integrity
An enterprise service bus (ESB) sits at the core of Smart SOA implementations – mediating, transforming and distributing service requests to reusable business process components, called services.
The ESB’s role in achieving process integrity is to deliver transaction integrity. Consistent and reliable updates spanning multiple services on multiple systems are performed together and never left in an incomplete state (two-phase commit). This often requires federated ESBs, which let you seamlessly synchronize services across multiple domains, while allowing you to match an ESB solution to the unique requirements of a domain, department or business partner.
IBM’s three ESB solutions for System z can work independently, or together in a federated ESB. IBM builds transaction security and transaction integrity features into its ESB products, each of which addresses specific IT requirements:
- IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS - provides a platform-independent solution for heterogeneous environments that delivers universal connectivity and message transformation to any application or service, whether standards-based or not.
- IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 - delivers message transformation, integration and routing functions in a rack-mountable network device with hardened security.
- IBM WebSphere ESB for z/OS - offers a standards-based connectivity and integration solution built on top of IBM WebSphere Application Server for z/OS.
Recent enhancements to these three ESB solutions make them easier to use, align them with Web Services standards including WS-Security, build in components to help you deploy your SOA project faster, and improve performance.
IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS V6.1
Built upon the market-leading IBM WebSphere MQ messaging middleware, which provides queuing and transactional facilities to preserve message integrity, IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS intelligently transforms and routes business data and protocol formats between applications across multiple platforms.
Five enhanced areas in WebSphere Message Broker V6.1 make it an ideal advanced ESB for Smart SOA deployments.
Ease of use and productivity
IBM developers have invested much work to make version 6.1 easier to use - easier to get started and deploy, and easier to build and test message flows - through enhancements that will have you updating your thinking about Message Broker:
- Wizards for experts and novices walk you through common tasks, such as creating a message definition.
- Point-and-click visual scripting replaces programming, though you can use Java if you want.
- Samples show you how to implement every piece of new and existing functionality in Message Broker, such as how to use the new WS-Security support, file processing options or SAP integration capabilities.
- An integrated test facility allows you to fire messages at a message flow, set break points, and see how the flow performs.
Enhanced SOA support
You can build a robust SOA with IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS V6.1. As Web Services (WS) standards have matured, WebSphere Message Broker adds native support for more advanced standards, such as WS-Security and WS-Addressing. Message Broker support for WS-Security lets you include in your message flows username and password validation and X509 authentication, as well as JSSE/JCE encryption and signing algorithms.
In addition, Message Broker V6.1 can serve as a Web services provider and consumer. As a provider, it can act as a gateway for Web services clients that want to interact with existing applications, which may or may not be enabled for Web Service standards. Message Broker can also be a Web services client, consuming external Web services to augment existing application interactions that are not Web Service enabled.
Message Broker’s Web Services support provides a broad range of integration possibilities with a myriad of Web Services-capable systems, including .NET, CICS, IBM WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances, and a diverse range of other platforms.
Other SOA-specific Message Broker V6.1 enhancements include:
- The ability to interrogate a service registry to choose the best service and route messages accordingly, as well as implementing policy-based routines that consider the content of the registry for improved governance.
- Integration with the IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, which lets you quickly and efficiently add these hardened network devices to an existing Message Broker environment and have them take over your CPU-intensive WS-Security processing.
Extended connectivity
WebSphere Message Broker plays well with all kinds of software, and the latest version can connect natively out-of-the-box to enterprise information systems (EIS) from SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle eCommerce and JD Edwards. This capability allows Message Broker to rapidly insert updates to and take updates from these systems.
In addition, Message Broker sets itself apart from other ESBs by delivering very large files at high message rates without requiring excessive storage. It can also process files using sophisticated record detection, and then filter file content and extract data from a file to create individual messages. What’s more, version 6.1 can break Batch files into individual transactions for online processing.
Built-in support for SMTP and TCP/IP lets Message Broker connect an ever increasing number of systems. This any-to-any approach lets Message Broker allow systems that were never designed to be online participate with real-time and enterprise traffic.
Administration and systems management
Do you use the Eclipse-based WebSphere MQ Explorer? With Message Broker V6.1 you can now use the same tool for Message Broker and MQ administration, so you can manage them together.
Another new feature allows Message Broker V6.1 to take identity information out of a message and transform it for another system. This capability allows you to use Message Broker as an enterprise-wide identity, authentication and authorization enforcement point in combination with LDAP and IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, for one example.
Platform support and performance
The Message Broker V6.1 update also adds support for Linux on Power, Linux on System z and HP Itanium, as well as 64-bit support on all Linux and UNIX platforms. In addition, version 6.1 posts significant performance improvements. Simply by upgrading you may realize 10-20 percent performance improvement across the board, and the ultra-high performance XML parser can process complex XML documents up to 150 percent faster.
When you need the most flexible and scalable mediation, transformation and routing between non-standard applications, protocols and data formats, WebSphere Message Broker delivers.
IBM WebSphere ESB for z/OS V6.1
Based on proven WebSphere Application Server for z/OS V6.1 technology, including its security model, IBM WebSphere ESB for z/OS V6.1 delivers standards-based connectivity and integration that allows you to create and deploy application and service interactions with reduced complexity, so you can focus on your core business. When the systems you need to connect all support Web Services standards, WebSphere ESB is a smart choice that delivers enhancements such as:
- Pattern-based configuration wizards that greatly simplify WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment clusters configuration by allowing you to configure servers en masse, instead of one by one.
- 64-bit support for greater heap size, which gives your ESB a virtually unlimited 16 exabytes (16 billion gigabytes) of memory, freeing your applications from the 2 Gb line for reduced garbage collection and improved application performance.
- An advanced mediation primitive for "fanout" that allows you to split a request and send messages to multiple service providers, and then collect, correlate and aggregate their asynchronous responses ("fan-in").
WebSphere ESB for z/OS can be extended with IBM WebSphere Process Server on z/OS, which is built upon and includes WebSphere ESB. WebSphere Process Server can orchestrate complex service interactions into highly optimized and effective processes, which may include human steps.
IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50
In early December, IBM plans to release DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 V3.6.1. This WebSphere DataPower appliance provides an easy to use, high performance, security-hardened hardware device for SOA. Its configuration-driven approach eliminates the need to program and provides a quick and easy way to configure and secure your services.
The latest version adds these features and more:
- WS-Policy support, which provides a flexible policy framework allowing IT to quickly consume new and updated standard (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging) and custom (e.g. service level agreements, routing) policies for centralized management and enforcement via DataPower SOA appliances through a single, standard approach.
- Simplified and higher performance WebSphere MQ support, so services can conveniently bridge between WebSphere DataPower, WebSphere MQ, CICS and IMS.
- Native connectivity for DB2 version 9 and PureXML, so you can easily link your DB2 hosted on System z to your SOA enterprise.
- Streamlined multi-step transaction processing - including simplified configuration of common ESB scenarios, such as looping, branching, fan out and parallel processing - to help you build your ESB solution more quickly.
With the IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, you simply plug it in, turn it on, and connect services to build your ESB solution.
Think smart with IBM
With significantly more experience than other vendors and the largest market share, IBM is uniquely positioned to deliver guiding principles and solutions based on hands-on experience with more than 5,700 service oriented customer deployments.
IBM’s ESB solutions and their recent enhancements reflect this experience, delivering transaction integrity, easier integration between ESBs, and the convenience to help you implement your next Smart SOA project - whether it streamlines a single departmental business process or spans your global enterprise to implement an innovative business model.
For more information:
|
|
 Free eNewsletters!
Publications for the IBM Tivoli and System z communities |
|
|
|
|
|
|
