The evolution of distributed computing is cloudy computing.

While VMWare is great at carving up a computer into smaller partitions of a computer, VMWare falls short when you want to create a large virtual computer out of many smaller computers.

We all know and love the concept of reuse when it comes to SOA in the application development space. Now let's consider the power of reuse in the infrastructure layer.

The concept is called Services Oriented Infrastructure (SOI), and Grid Computing is alive and well in the SOI. Whereby many low-cost, low-heat, low-power blades are being pooled together on an as-needed basis to run high performance computing analytics and data aggregation functions to create a large virtual super computer with hundreds of processors and gigabytes of storage as a distributed level 2 cache.

Before you say that you've figured out virtualization because you are using LPAR technology from IBM on an AIX p-series or you've figured out how to get Linux running on an i-series OS/400 system or on a z-series mainframe, you must first answer this question... What am I doing to leverage the huge amounts of underutilized Intel and AMD win/lin resources in the datacenter?

Microsoft is not ignoring grid computing, and they've rebranded the Windows 2003 64bit Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) as simply HPC server. Other ISVs such as Platform Computing have been selling products like LSF and the new Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO, and DataSynapse recently launched GridServer 5.0 with improved performance in a feature called "SpeedLink", as well as Fabric Server to automate the configuration and provisioning of J2EE container based applications. And the open source grid community has evolved since the creation of the Globus toolkit, and the GridGain folks have focused on cloud services integration with providers such as Google AppEngine and Amazon EC2.

June 10, 2007

What is an ESB?

The ESB is the Trust Domain. The Trust Domain is the ESB.

Without trust there is no integration. The ESB is a bridge between systems that were never intended to communicate or integrate.

What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

An ESB an application layer firewall. It is a protocol layer transformer. It is a message payload any-to-any and XML schema transformer. It is a passive transaction payload audit logger. The ESB is a layer of abstraction, that must be highly performant and highly available, and most of all the ESB must be heterogeneous in nature. The value that the ESB provides is directly proportionate to the number of systems that it can securely and rapidly integrate without introducing latency to the transaction.

The ESB must be secure and fast.

The ESB must scale horizontally.

The ESB must be a federated ESB, comprised of many ESBs.

We will next explore the concept of ESB support services.

ESB Support Services include:

• A Business Rules Engine (Fine Grained XACML Security Policy Decision Points, Policy Information Points, Policy Adminstration Points, and Policy Enforcement Points, and a JSR-94 compliant RETE engine to ensure that rules are processed in the correct sequence)
  
• XA / ACID Transaction Processing to ensure that the business transaction is only reported complete once all of the related system level transactions have completed.
  
• Web Application Firewall (AAA, SSO)
  
• Web Services XML Firewall (AAA, Payload Inspection, XML Schema Validation)
• XSLT Acceleration (Text to XML , XML to XML, XML t0 HTML, Any to Any)
  
• Multi-Protocol Transformation (HTTP - TIBCO - MQ - JMS - ODBC - FTP - SMPT, etc.)
  
• Exemption Handling / Error Logging
• System and Event Logging
• Business Compliance Transaction Logging