The birth of a SOA “soft appliance”

By Joseph Natoli (Intel) (25 posts) on August 5, 2008 at 7:08 am

A few years ago, we were facing some challenging scalability and costs issues with a key aspect of our enterprise infrastructure. Like many companies we dove head first in the use of XML and web services as a means to refresh a major enterprise application using the latest design patterns of n-tier distributed systems and SOA. Diligent development resulted in an architecture that worked as advertised; it was flexible, far easier to re-configure and re-purpose than its predecessor. That’s the good news and the usage followed.

Usage took off and so did the amount of XML traffic, and we started adding application servers, more and more application servers….to the point where we had hundreds of them. To slow the rising tide of the next app server deployment we started aggressively examining XML accelerators as co-processors to head-off a cost curve for this system that was steadily going the wrong direction. Software only solutions provided barely a marginal improvement with costly re-development implications. Hardware appliances offered massive improvements in XML processing, but their cost and inflexibility in terms of ways to embed into the existing architecture (protocols, systems management, etc) also made them impractical to deploy. We were stuck; an architecture keenly designed for flexibility and ease of deployment was a victim of it’s rapidly rising usage. We were forced to “de-feature” the architecture back, from XML and SOA to much more tightly coupled (yet at the time, more scalable) stacks of technology. This was a key learning that a major piece of enabling enterprise infrastructure was missing for large-scale SOA deployments…in our company and in the market overall.

In this time window, at the overall corporate level Intel recognized the strategic value of XML and made several acquisitions, including a leading XML acceleration provider Sarvega, Inc. The team at Sarvega has worked with many major companies and governments throughout the world in areas such as healthcare, financial services, and defense all with the same story as described above repeated over and over again many times. So, we set to solve the problem: provide an infrastructure that delivers the scalability and performance needed for high-use enterprise deployments of SOA and XML.

The result is Intel SOA Expressway. It is a “soft appliance”. It is SOA infrastructure software highly tuned for Intel multi-core processors.

It has the performance and scalability features of a dedicated hardware appliance (such as many thousands of XML message operations per second for tasks such as schema validation, XSLT, XQuery and XPath functions), yet can be embedded within and alongside an application without requiring a network hop to be injected between the application and the high-speed XML processing.

It will run on any standard OEM hardware platform, and as Moore’s Law continues to advance SOA Expressway’s currently impressive performance and scalability characteristics will continue to accelerate as well.

For more on Intel SOA Expressway: www.intel.com/software/soae

Thanks for getting this far. I look forward to hearing from you about your challenges in scaling SOA and what solutions you have found and/or persistent problems you are still facing.

In the next few blogs, I will share more about the details of how a soft appliance architecture and Intel SOA Expressway is a critical component of a cost-effective and scalable enterprise architecture whether you are just starting out on an SOA initiative or have a mature infrastructure in place.