XML AccelerationXML processing requires specialized silicon to ensure network infrastructure is not overwhelmed | |
The Problem: XML Processing Degrades Application Server PerformanceFor enterprises migrating toward XML and SOA, performance and scalability are of central concern. Processing XML is computationally intensive. Since XML is core to SOA, building real-time architectures utilizing XML-based Web services depends on the ability to rapidly process XML and perform policy based operations like routing, transformation and security at or near to wire speeds. Performing these policy based XML operations on the same application platforms running business logic is not an acceptable option. Application performance will be either degraded or application costs will go up as hardware platforms must be upgraded to support an increased number of CPUs. This has lead to purpose-built Web services devices to process XML policies separately from business logic. Solution: Specialized Silicon There are multiple bottleneck issues when processing XML. Marshaling and un-marshaling application data into XML is slow across all application platforms. This will only improve with better platforms or bytecode formats for Web service messages. But executing XML and SOAP policies can be accelerated today without improvements in the underlying application platforms. This requires an ability to optimize how XML streams are processed using specialized parser algorithms and hardware to accelerate those algorithms. Different XML and SOAP policies have very different performance requirements. XSLT based data transformation for instance requires an optimized XSLT process. But fast XSLT will not accelerate XML schema validation. In fact, applying a fast XSLT algorithm to solve XML schema validation may in fact slow XML performance. That is why an ideal XML parsing algorithm will process XML streams differently depending on policy. Hardware that can accelerate these optimized processes will therefore deliver the greatest benefit. In practice this involves a combination of maximal CPU horsepower, specialized silicon for offload of particularly slow cryptographic and XML parsing operations and a bus / memory / clustering architecture that can best leverage the hardware processors. Layer 7 Value: XML Acceleration Appliance The Layer 7 XML Accelerator provides hardware acceleration of key XML operations like message parsing, data validation and XML transformation. By performing these tasks in hardware Layer 7 ensures latency in Portal projects is reduced, ESB’s aren’t overloaded and service endpoints can offload computationally intensive operations to hardware. The SecureSpan XML Accelerator includes SSL acceleration for high speed termination of SSL sessions and supports centralized cluster configuration for easier management.
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