Dec 06, 2005

Forum Vantage XML Accelerator Enables Greater than 10,000 XML Transactions Per Second

Forum Systems, a Salt Lake-based provider of Web services and SOA security for threat protection and trust management, has released Forum Vantage XML Accelerator, a new product designed to provide XML acceleration across networks for secure and optimized delivery of Web Services.

XML applications automate interactions, adding more users and transactions from many different sources -- at near real-time. The fact that XML messages can consume more than double the bandwidth of traditional binary data formats leads to system-wide performance degradation. Forum Vantage XML Accelerator has been designed to eliminate the XML performance penalty with as much as a 200 percent increase in response times.

Forum Vantage XML Accelerator is a high performance appliance that leverages a 64-bit platform architecture for XML/SOAP parsing, XML Schema Validation, XPath processing and XSLT functions to streamline the operation, maintenance and security of next generation Application-Oriented Networks (AON). For IT administrators, the burden of unpredictable capacity planning is no longer an issue allowing for on-demand service-levels and a reduction in operational risk.

For developers, integration is a simple matter of pointing to a WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file and elimination of error-prone XML Schema validation, complex XSLT code and knowledge of low-level protocols. Forum Vantage XML Accelerator realizes the vision of shared XML processing in the data center for lower total cost of ownership.

"The AON infrastructure overlay adoption wave should be good news for enterprise Web services adoption, which Forrester expects to transform applications and IT systems of all types in the next 10 years," wrote senior analyst Larry Velez in a recent Forrester Research report. "This adoption wave will trigger exponential growth in XML-based network traffic, accompanied by new security issues that firms will have to manage."

"Companies looking to implement Service-Oriented Architectures face increasing challenges associated with processing content-intensive, metadata-formatted messages," said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. "The biggest challenge is that today's application servers consume up to 80 percent of processing capacity on XML parsing, validation and data transformation, even though companies are demanding increasing levels of performance and lower latency. Forum Systems is addressing a significant pain point associated with the performance of SOAs by introducing the Forum Vantage XML Accelerator to provide high-performance data center deployments."

Forum Vantage XML Accelerator is the third member of the Forum Systems Web Services and SOA security product family that includes the award-winning Forum Sentry SOA Gateway and Forum XWall Web Services Firewall with XML Intrusion Prevention and XML Antivirus.

"Forum Vantage is not only a value-add for pure performance needs, but a tool for organizations looking to consolidate hardware within their data center and gain an edge on total cost of ownership," said Walid Negm, vice president of marketing for Forum Systems. "By enabling greater than 10,000 XML messages per second and streaming very large multi-gigabyte files, Forum Vantage XML Accelerator is more than 200 times faster than software-based XML parsing and 1.8 to 3.3 times faster than competitive hardware alternatives."

"Forum Vantage XML Accelerator builds upon Forum's award-winning XML Web services security hardware and software solutions," said Mamoon Yunus, CTO of Forum Systems. "By focusing on core XML optimization while leveraging off-the-shelf components such as crypto accelerators and 64-bit processors, we have alleviated the performance pain points in today's SOA networks."