Comparison to Layer 7^* and Vordel^*

Are you considering a hardware XML security gateway from Layer 7 or Vordel? If so, it might be worth looking at Intel^® Expressway Service Gateway, a software appliance from Intel designed to solve the same security and performance challenges but in pure software form factor, requiring no additional add-in boards or hardware. By choosing Intel, you have the confidence and stability of a large company for your XML gateway project.

Intel Expressway Service Gateway offers faster performance, a more powerful mediation engine, virtualization support, and clustered management with a familiar appliance interface. The product has been benchmarked to be roughly twice as fast as equivalent hardware appliances, but running on standard operating systems and Intel^® Xeon 5500 and 5600 class servers. It is available in three form factors: software on a server, a virtual image, or hardware form-factor. If you are considering the Layer 7^* SecureSpan appliance or Vordel^* XML Gateway, it may be worth taking Expressway for a test drive.

Form-factor: Can you deploy a hardware only appliance in a virtual data center? Will it be portable and manageable by VMWare APIs? It is certified as a virtual appliance?

Compare against Intel Expressway Service Gateway’s Xen and VMWare based virtual appliances

Security: Often, hardened physical & logical security is cited as the need to have hardware only XML Gateways. In a majority of usage models a software form-factor is often more secure due to the customer’s ability to patch the O/S faster than the vendor can.

Compare Intel Expressway Service Gateway’s platform security model and its hardened appliance solution against hardware only XML Gateway solutions.

Performance: Low latency and high throughput has often been cited as reasons to look for custom hardware based XML Gateways.

Compare Intel’s unique machine-level XML processing technology coupled with extensive use of processing instructions offered by current IA Xeon processors equips Intel Expressway Service Gateway up to deliver 8x performance gains over custom hardware XML gateways.

Flexibility: Firmware based optimizations in customized hardware appliances imply slow feature changes and offer no flexibility for the customer to extend the platform.

Compare Intel Expressway Service Gateway’s Service Designer against & extensibility framework against other XML Gateways.

Ecosystem Support: XML Gateways from Software stack vendors have limited support for integration with competitive software stacks.

Compare Intel Expressway Service Gateway’s Governance integration with CentraSite and IBM WSRR. Compare interoperability support for zOS based or any other SOA environments, Consider Intel Expressway Service Gateway’s support for IBM^* Tivoli Access Manager, CA^* SiteMinder, and Oracle^* Access Manager and open XACML support with other XML Gateways.