Relationship with IBM DataPower appliances

The IBM® MQ Appliance includes components from the IBM DataPower Gateway family of products.

The IBM MQ Appliance firmware builds on the long-term expertise that IBM has in developing network appliances by including components from the IBM DataPower Gateway family of products. This relationship is visible in a number of places, for example, you will see mentions of 'DPOS' (the low level firmware/operating system of the appliance) in the system logs. The IBM MQ Appliance is, however, a discrete and stand-alone product; there is much functionality from IBM DataPower Gateway appliances that is not present in the IBM MQ Appliance, and vice versa.

You do not need to be familiar with IBM DataPower to work with the IBM MQ Appliance. The information that you need is supplied in this documentation, and day to day management tasks are intuitive, whichever interface you choose to use. However, in many cases you will find that any experience with DataPower appliances (for example, first-time setup, working with the CLI, web UI, and other management interfaces) is valuable and carries over to the IBM MQ Appliance.

Appliance domains

One fundamental aspect of the IBM DataPower appliance that is not carried over to the IBM MQ Appliance is the concept of an 'Application Domain'. In DataPower products, domains provide a mechanism for the separation of applications from unrelated areas (Lines of Business, Test versus Production, and so on). In some senses, this is similar to the separation provided by connecting applications to a different queue manager hosted on the same appliance.

Therefore, the domain feature is not currently used in the IBM MQ Appliance, and creation of new domains is disabled. However, by the very nature of the platform, you will come across 'domains' mentioned in a few contexts, for example, in creating REST URIs, or displaying system objects. Therefore, for the purposes of DPOS as exploited in the IBM MQ Appliance, only the 'default' domain is required, and 'default' should always be supplied in these contexts.