IBM came up with a hardware to work as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Well not entirely. It's called Datapower, a part of Websphere SOA solution stack. In our project there's a need to convert data from a mainframe fixed field format to XML and vice versa. So we were looking for a solution that can support a huge volume of transactions in a fraction of second. Using an ESB could be a possible approach but this one is easy to setup and since the conversion is done through hardware, it's really fast. They have three models for the appliance - XS35, XA40 and XI50. We were interested about the XI50 which includes the features of XS35 and XA40. It's a big (approx. 2.5ft / 2ft) blue box weighing nearly 20lbs. (I was about to break my back while trying to carry it). The cooling fans make loud noises. It has got an USB interface to the computer. You can set up the initial configurations using that and then it will let you access a web-interface (embedded as a firmware - like a wireless router) to handle configuration. Among the other main features
- Transforms disparate message formats - binary, legacy, and XML. It can load XSL templates, so XML to XML translations can be carried out using XSLT.
- Provides message routing (basic routing using round-robin) and security supporting standards such as WS-Security and WS-SecurityPolicy.
- Able to connect with MQ, HTTP or FTP.
- Helps heterogeneous applications to connect to registries and repositories, as well as directly to database.
- Able to translation modules generated by WTX (Websphere Transformation Extender). We tried this while converting XML from/to fixed field format. So it supports non-XML such as COBOL Copybooks.
- A piece of routing logic can be injected using the routing policies.
Here is a link for more information http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/
It doesn't support adapters like ESBs. It's a hardware so it can give you a power of processing equivalent to 10 servers running ESBs. Looking at the current prices of servers and the limitations on the customization making a selection will be a little tough. Unless it's not an XML to XML conversion WTX should be kept handy.
