WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances

WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances, part of the WebSphere Business Process Management suite of products, is part of WebSphere, in the Application Connectivity (MOM) subcategory of products.

The DataPower products are network appliances. Like an IP router or hub, it's a box; the entire interface is four Eathernet ports and a serial port (and a power jack). It's rack-mountable; its size is 1U, or about the size of a large pizza box. The software is all firmware, with flash memory for configuration settings. There's really nothing to install; you unpack it from the shipping container, plug it into the network, and start using it. You do need to enable it, and you need to configure it, which is a little like programming, but much simpler than a traditional software server like a database or a J2EE app server.

WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50

Interestingly, even though DataPower is effectively a hardware device, it's grouped as part of the IBM WebSphere Brand. This is kind of an odd choice, since Systems Group is the part of IBM that makes hardware. Software Group's products come on CDs or can be downloaded, and are installed on host computers. But DataPower was added to Software Group, and specifically the WebSphere brand, because the appliances have really great synergy with our enterprise service bus (ESB) products. Heck, the XI50 even is an ESB.

The DataPower products come from a company called DataPower, which IBM acquired in 2005.

(Original blog posting: DataPower)

Product Overview

Kyle Brown posted this very helpful overview as a comment on my blog:

The DataPower boxes are useful for a number of reasons. First of all, they are great at handling tasks like XML/Web Services security faster than can be done on general purpose hardware/software, and the setup of security on them is easier than it is in J2EE app servers. What's more the XS40 (the yellow security box) and XI50 (the blue integration box, which is pictured above) handle a number of specific XML threats that aren't generally covered by J2EE app servers.

Second, the Blue box (the XI50) is very adept at handling integration tasks that involve converting from one protocol (like HTTP or MQ) to another. It also handles any-to-any data format conversion so it can convert say, COBOL copybook formats to XML.

DataPower Products

There are currently three currently three DataPower products.

	WebSphere DataPower XML Accelerator XA35 aka The Green Box The XA35 validates XML documents against schemas you provide and converts XML documents using XSL transforms you provide.
	WebSphere DataPower [XML Security Gateway XS40] aka The Yellow Box Acts as an XML firewall to inspect traffic and reject bad traffic, and excells at WS-Security encryption and decryption.
	WebSphere DataPower [Integration Appliance XI50] aka The Blue Box Handles binary, text, EDI, and other non-XML formats and can convert between them. Also has a built-in WebSphere MQ client, great for converting between HTTP and WMQ traffic.

The products are downward compatible, so the XI50 does everything the XS40 does, which does everything the XA35 does. So if, for example, you need WS-Security and WMQ conversion, you can do both with the XI50 (but only the WS-Security part with the XS40).

The DataPower boxes are super secure. It processes XML so fast, it does so at what we call wire speed.

Where You Can Learn More

Add-ons

alphaWorks has a tool for administering DataPower appliances from the WAS admin console:

Integrated DataPower Management for WebSphere Application Server