12th Annual Well-Connected Awards: Application Infrastructure

Over the past year, we've reorganized our business applications coverage to align more closely with the evolution of IT and the applications that support and enable your business.

Just as IP routing and switching eventually became an integral piece of your network infrastructure, some applications have become so necessary to critical operations that they are now considered part of your infrastructure. Enterprise service platforms (BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere Application Server) and integration technology and middleware (including enterprise service buses) have become as necessary to supporting the business' needs as the underlying hardware that provides basic connectivity between people and applications.

SOA-Much Change

Meanwhile, IT departments everywhere have been re-evaluating the ability of their application infrastructure ito support a migration to an SOA (service-oriented architecture). During this time, we've tested a wide range of products designed to support the move to SOA, including enterprise service bus and generalized integration technology.We dove into the ESB and integration markets first. Integration products reside on the service enablement layer of the SOA stack (layer one of three); ESB suites on the middle, service orchestration layer. On the service orchestration layer, several services are combined to create one cohesive service. For example, separate customer credit-check and address-lookup services can be combined into a "customer information service" that draws data from disparate sources--in this case, an enterprise application and a separate database.

Without these basic foundations of application infrastructure, it's nearly impossible to implement and deploy the enterprise applications at the process orchestration layer, the highest layer of the SOA stack. We discovered a plethora of ESB products, each supporting a different vision of what the service orchestration layer should provide in terms of features and functionality.

BEA Systems and Oracle shone in our review, with their careful attention to the service orchestration process and support of ESB core features such as transformation and routing. The Web-based, design-time environment of BEA's AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1 offered a tantalizing vision of the future of service orchestration environments. AquaLogic's ability to consume and produce Web services, while maintaining publish/subscribe capabilities through both JMS (Java Messaging Service) and Web services, rounded out its offering.

Still, Oracle and TIBCO Software struck a balance between pure service orchestration and a healthy set of adapters, proving that commoditized service enablement can effectively be included in the service orchestration layer without impinging upon the purist view of an all Web services-oriented ESB.

The only piece missing from most ESB products is true integration with a registry/repository solution at both design and run time. Products supported one or the other but not both.SOA-Much the Same

Despite the ever-present hype of SOA and the excitement--or is that dread?--that comes from re-architecting your entire infrastructure, some applications and technology simply cannot be subject to a rip-and-replace strategy. Organizations whose critical applications reside on a mainframe, for example, need a long-term retirement and migration strategy, something that may require many years to complete. Yet SOA's benefits are real and don't demand a complete overhaul of such aging technology implementations.

Legacy systems residing in aging big iron, for example, can't often be replaced in one fell swoop. Service enablement offers an alternative by reusing existing assets and allowing a gradual, sane retirement strategy. By service enabling legacy technology such as CICS and mainframe applications, the business can achieve its goal of moving forward with its SOA initiatives. While the business and IT moves forward with SOA, the legacy technology migration can occur "under the covers," with no one the wiser when a change occurs.

Integration technology is poised to provide service enablement as an evolutionary, and necessary, step toward remaining relevant in a standards-based, Web services oriented paradigm. In fact, integration technology remains the foundation on which SOA is based. A strategy that uses integration products' ability to expose legacy data sources as services can enable the gradual replacement of aging technology.

During the year, we looked at individual integration technologies, such as Cast Iron Systems' winning iA3000 appliance, as well as the integration capabilities of products from traditional EAI vendors such as TIBCO, IBM, and Fiorano Software. While every integration product we tested gets the job done, Cast Iron Systems does so with finesse and ease. This up-and-coming vendor stole the spotlight, and again proves that orchestrating communication between applications isn't rocket science. With new support for SAP IDocs (intermediate documents) and Web services, the iA3000 enables a wide variety of legacy protocols and applications. No other integration technology we tested provides the out-of-the-box experience of Cast Iron's iA3000.Spam Filtering

Technology marches on, and so does spam's ability to worm its way into our inboxes despite the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. We're still sick of spam, and we suspect we'll continue to be until the deluge is stopped. Our Network Computing Barracuda spam filter tagged as junk 78 percent of all our mail--that's 3,159,098 messages--between May 18 and Oct. 19, 2005, and the percentage of junk continues to increase. We looked at spam filtering technology twice this past year and were pleased to see improvements in accuracy, reporting and administrative capabilities.

While most large enterprises have spam filters in place, or have the cash to outsource the duties to providers such as Postini, FrontBridge and MessageLabs, small and medium enterprises were left to drown in a sea of spam. We were pleased to see a variety of spam filtering vendors offer products that integrate closely with Microsoft Exchange. Mail Frontier Gateway Server 4.1 led the charge to rescue the SMB market, with easy administration and integration with Exchange, as well as excellent reporting functions and phishing-specific recognition technology that, while imperfect, is at least a step in the right direction.

Application Infrastructure Categories
• Spam Filter
• Integration Technology
• ESB

Application Infrastructure Winners

Spam Filter
Winner: SonicWall MailFrontier Gateway Server 4.1
MailFrontier Gateway Server 4.1 stood out for its ability to classify phishing attacks by rating the sender's reputation. This is a useful feature even if it only manages to warn a user that any e-mail might be an attempt to steal information. With a good accuracy rating and excellent reporting facilities, MailFrontier pleased us in testing, with its limited administration requirements and easy integration with Microsoft Exchange.

Integration Technology
Winner: Cast Iron Systems iA3000
Integration isn't rocket science, and Cast Iron proves that the song and dance required by many products in this market is fluff. The Cast Iron iA3000 integration appliance does what many try but fail to do: out-of-the-box integration. The iA3000's 1U form factor and out-of-band management make it easy for administrators to manage, and its design-time environment boasts an SOA-like orchestration palette of integration technologies sure to satisfy even the most demanding integration connoisseurs.

ESB
Winner: BEA Systems AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1
BEA's AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1 was a pleasure to work with from installation through orchestration of services to deployment. Combining a unique Web-based, design-time environment with a flexible message routing system riding atop a stripped down WebLogic 9.1 server, BEA's ALSB 2.1 stood above the competition and did so at an astoundingly affordable price-point. The product's ability to connect to JMS and Web Services and orchestrate disparate services into a composite service, as well as its flexible routing capabilities, make AquaLogic the ESB we'd want to deploy in our own enterprise.

Where Are They Now?
Cast Iron Systems Application Router 1000 won our Business Application Product of the Year in 2005 and its big brother is back this year, in a smaller form factor with a sexier integration environment and even more painless integration options. The company recently recruited PeopleSoft's former executive VP, Ram Gupta, to help lead its charge into the enterprise data center as CEO of Cast Iron. The product's recent inclusion of integration with enterprise application provider SAP and support for multiple orchestrations in a more project-oriented manner shows he's got the company on the right track.

The iA3000's support of SAP's IDoc and RFC APIs, Web services, and increasingly SOA-focused orchestration engine show that the company is headed in the right direction while maintaining its integration-as-a-commodity approach to connecting with conventional data sources.

Cast Iron continues to evolve with the market by providing seamless integration with legacy applications and protocols, as well as forward-looking technologies such as Web services for new versions of its integration appliance. Not only can this device integrate with SAP via legacy protocols, it can integrate with CRM giant Salesforce.com through its Web services API. Its template-based approach to integration with Salesforce.com makes the process easy, a sure sign that Cast Iron will remain a force in integration.

Lori MacVittie is a Network Computing senior technology editor working in our Green Bay, Wis., labs. She has been a software developer, a network administrator and a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Write to her at [email protected].0