Layer 7 offers ESB appliance

By Alex Handy

October 27, 2009 — Enterprise services buses seem to be here to stay, regardless of whatever happens to SOA. With many organizations enforcing policies within their ESBs, Layer 7 decided to push firewall capabilities into its ESB. On Oct. 11, Layer 7 introduced the Oracle Service Bus Appliance (OSBA), which brings dedicated hardware to bear on the problem.

As a dedicated ESB appliance, the OSBA is designed to perform under heavy loads. Adam Vincent, CTO for the public sector at Layer 7, said that the OSBA was designed at the request of an intelligence agency in the United States. The agency, said Vincent, needed a way to link its ultra-secure inner network to its somewhat less secure outer network. The OSBA was built to funnel traffic between these two networks, and to enforce policies on all packets coming in and out.

“Even prior to the acquisition of Sun, we were working on a product with an XML firewall and Oracle Service Bus together in one appliance. It allows you to deploy a high-performance enterprise services bus that's secure,” said Vincent.

“To begin with, we're a security and governance company. We can mediate security policy and perform SLA monitoring in your DMZ [demilitarized zone]. The problem was customers still wanted the ability to mediate transports, and do routing between internal partners, external partners and the cloud. The OSBA is a souped-up firewall with advanced integration capabilities,” he added.

The combination of these capabilities allow the OSBA to do more than a typical ESB. Normally, an ESB doesn't stop traffic; it instead normalizes it and ensures that all the machines involved are speaking in the same contexts and formats. An ESB, said Vincent, typically can't stop packets. A firewall, on the other hand, can.

“I think the driver for an ESB is to create loose coupling on your existing application," he said. "You use the ESB to virtualize and mediate all your existing applications and make them available as single or multiple transports on the other side. It's built on the premise that your existing ESB should never terminate traffic from the Internet."

The OSBA is available as part of an Oracle license agreement. Layer 7 sells it as an additional product on top of existing Oracle agreements.

Related Search Term(s): ESB, Layer 7

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Layer 7 takes security to the cloud
The security software provider has made its technology available for cloud deployment so that organizations can move security policies to and from the cloud Read More...