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Intel ® SOA Expressway |        |
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Intel® SOA Expressway includes the following key features and benefits: • Fast-Path for Business Information Networks - Intel® SOA Expressway combines a high performance workflow engine, native XML acceleration, appliance manageability and codeless design for high-volume, high-throughput SOA applications. SOA Expressway provides unmatched price for performance that reduces capital costs for scaling SOA. The goal of SOA Expressway is to reduce the need for additional software, servers and SOA appliances required to scale SOA from pilot projects to production. • Soft-Appliance: Software with Appliance Performance - Intel® SOA Expressway is designed to reduce the overhead incurred by complex workflow and XML processing, but without relying on expensive SOA appliances or hardware acceleration. Instead, SOA Expressway scales XML and workflow processing on Intel Multi-Core and is able to achieve appliance performance in a software form factor. Better yet, SOA Expressway retains appliance features such as reliability and manageability, effectively providing the best of both worlds in a single product. • Simplified Environment - Intel® SOA Expressway isn’t a large suite of separate products purchased as a ‘suite’; instead, it consolidates common SOA and appliance functions into a single product. It is a highly tuned, best-of-breed solution designed for rapid integration and communications that leverages Intel expertise in getting maximum performance out of software, hardware, and operating system technologies. • Partner Compatible - In support of SOA principals, Intel® SOA Expressway is vendor stack neutral, meaning it does not require any additional SOA products (such as SOA appliances or application servers) to operate and is compatible with SOA stacks from all of major vendors, including open-source. • Rapid Implementation - Intel® SOA Expressway can be up and running in 60 days or less - even in complex network and data center environments. Its “codeless” designer means that organizations can rely on configuration rather than coding for most common tasks, reducing the need for scare development resources. Intel SOA Expressway aims to simplify SOA with a unique form factor, purpose-built acceleration, codeless design and workflow, legacy format support and platform extensibility. These capabilities brought together in a single platform define the hyper-ESB product category.
For little bus integration, the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) has become the centerpiece of many SOA implementations. However, ESBs aren't enough to form the big-bus or actual SOA backplane. Without a clear big-bus architecture that connects islands of integration, one simply trades application heterogeneity for middleware heterogeneity. Intel SOA Expressway is explicitly designed to form a true domain-wide SOA by combining gateway and integration capabilities in an easy to manage appliance style form factor.  When Enterprises begin to implement the SOA design practice with an ESB, they inevitably start with internal pilot projects to prove out their SOA strategy. However, as more internal applications move from pilot to production they often reach a tipping point where message volumes and throughput requirements can dramatically increase. These additional performance requirements coupled with cross-domain SOA for partner interactions drive the main requirements for a hyper-ESB. A hyper-ESB creates a SOA fast path between mission critical applications in an existing SOA, especially those services with high volume, high-throughput XML message processing requirements. Fast-path requirements often apply to services that include XML manipulation as part of their core business processing such as transformation, validation, parsing, routing, conversion or security. Further, the hyper-ESB is also well-suited for cross-domain SOA communication and can provide the on-ramp to existing internal ESB infrastructure or provide critical sections of the ESB itself. In this sense the hyper-ESB is especially designed for high-performance, cross-domain SOA enablement. What makes a hyper-ESB fundamentally different from a general purpose ESB for SOA enablement? The tenets of a hyper-ESB include features that focus on performance, reliability and simplicity. In short, the hyper-ESB is a complimentary building block in any SOA that demands mission critical performance and throughput.
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Q: We are already looking at Open-source ESB products like Mule and ServiceMix; when would I use Intel® SOA Expressway? A: Intel® SOA Expressway is specially designed for high performance SOA, XML and Web Services integration scenarios that cross integration domains. For example, if you have a critical application that needs to perform significant XML processing such as transformation (XSLT), routing (XPath), schema validation, large XML document processing or XML web services security, Intel SOA Expressway may be a good fit. Further, Intel SOA Expressway also has optimized workflow execution for server processors such as the Intel® Xeon® 5000 Sequence and is designed to scale with Intel's general multi-core processor roadmap. Q: Is Intel SOA Expressway based on JBI? Is the product extensible? A: Unlike many Java-based vendor and open-source ESB products, Intel SOA Expressway has an efficient fast-path C/C++ architecture with optimized workflow execution and local service invocation that avoids the overhead of JBI. Instead, Intel SOA Expressway supports arbitrary Apache Axis 2 services for platform extensibility with the optional Java Integration Framework Q: Is Intel SOA Expressway a hardware or software product? How does it support Intel® hardware? A: Intel SOA Expressway is a software runtime designed to behave like a hardware appliance. To this end, it is optimized for OEM Intel multi-core server platforms from major vendors like HP and Dell. The software runtime also includes hooks to take advantage of Intel® I/OAT, on-board cryptographic acceleration, and Intel® multi-core optimizations. If you'd like more details our datasheet is available here Q: Does Intel SOA Expressway support the full WS-* stack? What about REST? A: Intel is committed to the highest level of standards support for SOA (both WS-* and REST) and includes rich standards support. For a complete list of supported standards please see our datasheet. Q: Can you explain your general architectural model? Do you support WSDL? A: Intel SOA Expressway has a logical model based entirely on WSDL and WS-BPEL. That is, all services (whether local or remote) are represented by a WSDL. From the perspective of the runtime, every call is a service call represented by some WSDL, even input messages. This provides a clean standardized separation between the design-time and run-time. Q: Where can I download an evaluation copy of Intel® SOA Expressway? A: Evaluation copies are not currently available for download. However, if you would like more information on Intel SOA Expressway or would like to investigate a developer license, you can send an e-mail to intelsoainfo@intel.com or request to be contacted here
Intel® SOA Expressway currently supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (2.6 kernel) and has been validated on the following server platforms:
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