What is DataPower and Why DataPower?

Straight from the IBM site, this is the definition of DataPower -

IBM® WebSphere® DataPower® SOA Appliances are purpose-built, easy-to-deploy network devices that simplify, help secure, and accelerate your XML and Web services deployments while extending your SOA infrastructure.

Lets stop with that and talk a little bit about SOA, the current architecture and how DataPower fits in.

The middleware infrastructure of an enterprise need to support XML and Web Services, since its emergence and popularity. This meant that the ESB or enterprise service bus had to support the emerging technology. This was proving to be an problem because of -

Traditional middleware installation has increased installation and maintenance costs
Operational costs involved in supporting the new data format (XML) and the existing formats (flatfile, cobol copybook etc)
Security – New forms of attack on the infrastructure

[1]DataPower SOA appliances address these three challenges with the creation of specialized, purpose-built, consumable SOA appliances that redefine the boundaries of middleware. As the “hardware ESB,” DataPower SOA appliances are an increasingly important part of the IBM ESB family.

As mentioned earlier DataPower is an appliance. So why exactly do we need an appliance what can it do?. Lets looks a typical infrastructure – (this is not how it is but helps to explain the situation )

For security we have – Firewalls, Virus Scanners, Proxy Servers etc. Then we have Mainframes, Databases, server clusters where services are hosted. Also there will be a server that is used for authentication. Given all these h/w and software, the cost to install, configure, maintain and operate any of these components are going to be huge. Not to mention that we have XML, Copybook, flatfile and databases. This would need data-transformations. Additional cost on h/w and s/w for that.

Lets talk about security. We just cannot expose a service just like that, obviously it will be hidden behind a Proxy server and then we need SSL enabled for that. But given any web sever – Apache / IIS – SSL being resource intensive is going to cripple the server(s) badly and it wont be able to take in many connections.

Now lets see how DataPower fits in here -

Throw away the Firewall/ Proxy server, bring in the DataPower XML Security Gateway XS40. This single appliance is able to provide the infrastructure with – encryption, firewall filtering, digital signatures, schema validation, WS-Security, XML access control, XPath etc.

If the infrastructure has to handle a lot of XML and XML based processing, then there is the – DataPower XML Accelerator XA35. It can perform XML parsing, XML schema validation, XPath routing, XSLT, XML compression, and other essential XML processing with wire-speed XML performance.

[1]Talk about web service management and security you have – DataPower Integration Appliance XI50. XI50 in itself has the capabilities of XS40 and XA35. In addition to that, it provides or has -

Any-to-any transformation engine
Transport bridging
Integrated message-level security
Lightweight message brokering

Which means that with all these capabilities you got yourself an ESB.

Talk about HTTP-to-FTP protocol bridging you got it, talk about MQ-to-HTTPS support you got it. Want to convert an XML to FlatFile- DONE. Spreadsheet to XML – DONE. The possibilities are unmatched. Interestingly all these happens at wire-speed, with almost no delay. So you dont have to worry about the entire system getting slow, because the XML-CopyBook transformation takes 5 minutes. Or your enterprise h/w needs is going to cut a big piece for itslef from the budget.

Hope this helps. So far this is my best effort to explain – what and why Datapower