Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus Architecture

Todays enterprise networks typically deploy hundreds of applications from different vendors. Theres little standardization of communication protocols between individual enterprise systems, and exchanging data between applications from different vendors is surprisingly hard. The lack of a standard platform for distributed enterprise applications increases the cost and complexity of developing and deploying business solutions. Emerging standards for enterprise communication, connectivity, transformation, portability and security have tried to simplify the enterprise integration and middleware problem.

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a new breed of enterprise middleware designed to alleviate these and other problems. An Enterprise Service Bus provides an opportunity to apply truly open industry standards in a heterogeneous, best-of-breed environment. Standards-based technology coordination expands choices and is less costly.

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus
Enabling Standards-Based Integration

An ESB is a foundation for an enterprise-wide SOA, allowing enterprises to integrate applications and processes as standards-based, event-driven services over a highly distributed, centrally managed infrastructure. With no single point of failure, ESBs are inherently reliable and linearly scalable and have no performance bottlenecks. ESB Services (including application/business logic as well as fundamental transformation, routing, connectivity and distribution services) may be deployed and managed from any physical location across the enterprise network. Built entirely on industry standards including XML and Web Services, ESBs enable the next wave of comprehensive and affordable integration solutions, unifying applications and infrastructure within an enterprise and delivering the value IT departments are looking for via reuse, flexibility and faster time to market.

An Enterprise Service Bus is an enterprise platform that implements standardized interfaces for communication, connectivity, transformation, portability, and security. Specific standards include:

Communication:

Standards-based communication infrastructure, (for example, JMS).

Services need to communicate reliably with each other over the network. A reliable, scalable, robust, and location-independent communications system dramatically reduces the development time for distributed systems while increasing reliability.

Connectivity

Standards-based connectivity including Web services, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and .NET adapters. (Suns J2EE and Microsofts .NET are the two dominant distributed computing architecture frameworks. J2EE provides portability of a single language [Java] over multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. .NET supports a wide range of languages but is primarily tied to the Microsoft Windows operating system and Intel hardware.).

To extract data from a service, one first needs to be able to easily connect to that service. Absent any standards, this has been difficult.

Transformation

Standards-based transformation engines (for example, XSLT and Xquery).

Data produced by a given service is typically not easily understood by another service; to make the data digestible by another service, it first needs to be suitably transformed.

Portability

Modern Enterprise Service Bus implementations typically support development in multiple programming languages. This, coupled with the inherent portability of the ESB infrastructure, makes the Enterprise Service Bus a true multi-language, multi-platform enterprise backbone.

Most enterprises have a variety of computer systems, ranging from thin-clients and Windows desktop PCs to higher-end UNIX servers and mainframe systems. Portability and ease of communication between different operating environments remain concerns for enterprise solutions.

Security

Standards-based security (for example, LDAP and SSL ).

Finally, all connectivity to and communication between enterprise services need to be secure at levels satisfactory to the enterprise. Since distributed applications span different departments and locations within and outside the firewall, security is highly important.

• Evaluating an ESB
• Fiorano ESB Architecture
• Benefits of an ESB

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus System Architecture

The Fiorano ESB implements a brokered, peer-to-peer (often referred to as super peer) system architecture, which combines the management benefits of typical centralized hub-and-spoke systems with the performance benefits of fully distributed peer-to-peer systems, while avoiding the particular disadvantages of both of these individual approaches. The following figure illustrates the Fiorano ESB brokered peer-to-peer architecture. 

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus System Architecture

Particular benefits of the Fiorano ESB system architecture include:

• Enterprise Class Backbone: Underlying the ESB architecture is an enterprise-class, standards-based messaging backbone which provides secure and reliable communications between any number of applications and distributed processes across the enterprise. Using Fioranos unique distributed peer-to-peer JMS implementation, the backbone allows distributed processes and composite applications to scale to meet the requirements of the most demanding global enterprise networks.
• Efficiency: ESB peers at the end-points of the network allow the components of a distributed application to exchange data concurrently, enabling all of the parallelism in a distributed business process to be exploited. For instance, an order management system in a manufacturing plant can check its inventory status even as the sales-force management system is updating the order database. Data transformations and other computations required by distributed business processes are performed concurrently at the end-points of the network.
• Unbounded Scalability: With dispersed computation and parallel data flow between nodes, ESB peers scale naturally and seamlessly with the addition of new peer nodes and Enterprise Services across the network.
• Fault Tolerance: Multiple peer servers at the end-points of the Fiorano ESB network ensure that there is no single point of failure. If one of the peers fails, Services connected to that peer fail-over to another peer in the system, allowing distributed processes to remain unaffected; in the case of a catastrophic failure at a peer node, the rest of the system continues operation, localizing losses to the failed node only.
• Ease of Administration: In a Fiorano ESB network, operations such as event-handling, security authentication and administration are performed by centralized servers. ESB peers at the end-points of the network are easily administered via tools connected to the centralized ESB Enterprise Server.

Fioranos brokered peer-to-peer architectural approach thus combines the benefits of both peer-to-peer systems and hub-and-spoke systems in a single cohesive architecture for a scalable enterprise backbone.

Enterprise Service Bus Benefits

Enterprise Service Bus leverage recent integration technology enhancements into a standards- based, affordable package. Enterprise Service Bus offer several advantages over existing, proprietary integration solutions:

Extended, Standards-based Connectivity
Enterprise Service Bus incorporate a standards based messaging backbone, letting systems within and across the entire value chain easily exchange information via asynchronous or synchronous messaging. An Enterprise Service Bus provides enhanced systems connectivity using Web services, J2EE, .NET, and other standards.

Flexible, Service-based Application Composition
Based on SOA, the Enterprise Service Bus application model allows complex distributed systems, including integration solutions spanning multiple applications, systems, and firewalls, to be composed from pre-built, pre-tested services. This provides easy extensibility.

Reduced TCO via Enhanced Reuse
The SOA approach to application construction directly promotes reuse, easing maintenance and further reducing system TCO.

Reduced Time-to-market and Increased Productivity
An Enterprise Service Bus provides these benefits through the reuse of components and services, and the ease of application composition offered by an SOA, standards-based communication, transformation, and connectivity. All these benefits derive from the strong support for standards in each component of the Enterprise Service Bus architecture: communications, connectivity, transformation, portability, and security.

An Enterprise Service Bus delivers a powerful, affordable, standards-based backbone throughout the enterprise and partner organizations. It smoothes the operational path of the processes running a business and reduces the time, effort, and cost of integrating the different components supports these process steps. A powerful benefit of this type of approach is that it allows in-house development teams to build new applications that are already integration-enabled and can easily be incorporated into the Enterprise Service Bus as required. Associated benefits include savings on investments of expensive