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A Multi-Core Optimized Software Appliance -A New Breed of Service Intermediary

In the enterprise IT environment today, modern middleware technologies make it easier to expose existing or new business applications as sets of services. However, with the mashup of cloud-based services and enterprise data center services, the visibility of how a service created today will be used in the future gets murkier.

This is because it’s difficult to predict how a service will be consumed over long periods of time and by which consumers, and further how the service may be integrated with other services or legacy applications to create new composite services. It also remains a challenge to architect services in such a way that service upgrades don’t affect consumers unpredictably.

This article describes Service intermediary usage models, limitations of hardware XML & security gateway appliances, presents next-gen intermediaries, and publishes scenario benchmark testing results.