Introduction

The business environment is changing rapidly today. Business dynamics and technological innovations have left organizations with a disparate mix of operating systems, applications, and databases. This has made it difficult, time consuming, and costly for IT departments to deliver new solutions that integrate heterogeneous applications based on different technologies.

Businesses that can react effectively to change will survive an increasingly difficult economy. Business users and IT developers are looking to deploy composite applications to enhance corporate decision-making and provide access to data, increase operational efficiencies, and reduce the overhead costs associated with maintaining information silos spread across the enterprise.

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus is a distributed infrastructure platform based on the latest internet standards, that provides a solution the integration dilemma facing organizations. This chapter introduces you to various communication models and component models traditionally employed for distributed computing and explains Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus combines the elements of brokered P2P communication with novel component model for service deployment, monitoring and management.

Business Requirements

Three key requirements are driving the next generation of distributed applications:

Current Platform and Solution Limitations

Vendors positioning themselves as “solution providers” of composite applications have not been able to address many of the needs of realtime enterprises. Mired in their approach of integrating applications using brute force low level programming techniques, most incumbent vendors have created a patchwork of products that are adding greater complexity and costs in an attempt to provide solutions.

In particular, existing solutions for integration and composite application deployment suffer from the following problems:

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus Advantages

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus ’s industry leading architecture lends a unique set of advantages to businesses. This results in larger overall savings in cost of ownership of solutions involving distributed application composition and maintenance.

Following section briefly describes the benefits which Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus leads to distributed applications in a networked environment.

Performance

Business processes are traditionally parallel, and a brokered P2P architecture allows one to map the parallel process onto multiple machines to achieve optimal throughputs.

As almost all of data routing and execution of business rules etc. is handled at the corresponding source or sync of information, the execution of distributed application maps directly to the underlying network infrastructure, leading to a better overall performance as each execution unit can work in parallel without hindering the performance of other execution units running somewhere else on the network.

Scalability

The P2P approach of Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus completely decentralize the execution of service and routing of data between them. Communication distributed applications can exchange information in real time directly over Peer to Peer routes managed by Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus.

Elimination of dependency on a centralized server for all business rules execution as well as data routing, lends unprecedented levels of scalability to Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus. Multiple applications can execute completely independent of each other on same network of computer, while being controlled and monitored from a central administration console.

This allows the speed of data processing to scale linearly with the addition of new nodes in the network, assuming of course that there is enough parallelism to exploit in the problem/business-process in the first place.

Reliability

Intelligent daemons running on network end points enables a whole new class of failover which not only applies to the failover of communication infrastructure but also to the participating applications.

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus allows definition of failover not only for the communication infrastructure but also for the business services which are executing in Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus environment.

This lends an additional level of failover to the entire business processes, eliminating the need for manually monitoring network endpoints and reinstantiating services and handling switchover to secondary nodes.

Lower Costs of Ownership

By allowing businesses to leverage unused Compute & Storage prowess at the Network endpoints, Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus precludes the need for additional high end hardware requirements for composing complex distributed applications.

Defining business processes as coarse grained components with well defined interfaces, allows a high degree of reuse of the entire business processes, without any additional programming efforts.

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus industry leading support for real time event enabled information delivery over built in JMS bus, leads to reduced latency in detecting errors and reacting to failures. At the same time end point redundancy and failover increases the availability of the business processes, leading to an overall reduction in total cost of ownership of such a solution.

The Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus™ Infrastructure Stack

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus realizes the benefits of a brokered Peer to Peer architecture together with a coarse grained service based modularity via a five layer infrastructure stack, with each layer playing a distinct role, as illustrated in Figure 1.