Progress Sonic ESB Features & Functionality

Event-driven architecture: Maximizes flexibility for service re-use and efficient, scalable processing.

Efficient, distributed processing of event streams

Supports distributed, high-throughput parallel processing of event streams. Services asynchronously place messages on and draw messages off enterprise messaging backbone. Integration services and enterprise messaging brokers scale independently, allowing efficient allocation of resources for computing and communication-intensive processing when and where needed.

Rich set of message exchange patterns supports full spectrum of integration scenarios

Facilitates integration with a wide range of protocols and business system interactions. Supports full spectrum of integration scenarios: service invocation, data access, aggregation and dissemination, and notification and routing of events.

Services consumers and producers can be configured to use any combination of the following:

• An event notification or request-reply model (depending on whether a response is expected or not).
• A synchronous or asynchronous mode (depending on whether the sender must wait for a response or not).
• Cardinality (point-to-point, one-to-many, or many-to-many).

Flexible, consistent model—shared by connected services and ESB-hosted integration services

Supports flexible, configured interaction. Fully isolates application or service from considerations of deployment location, communication protocol, quality of service,message format, message destination(s), service orchestration sequence, and error recovery. Service API isolates implementation details of underlying transport (whether JMS, Web services, or other technologies), eliminating low-level service coding burden and transport dependencies, and, thereby, allowing dynamic selection of transport at runtime.

Parameterized, extensible service model (representing both ESB-hosted integration services and proxy services for connected applications)

Parameterized for configuration-driven customization at the time of service instantiation as well as for service invocation. Users may:

• Extend or replace built-in services with customized alternatives. Regardless, the ESB provides full remote deployment, monitoring, and management capabilities--including for fundamental services, such as routing and transformation.
• Alternatively, employ service-level interceptors to extend the functionality of existing services. The interceptors allow users to insert multiple levels of "chained" functionality that can be executed either before or after the service has been invoked.

Distributed deployment: Managed environment hosts integration services, service orchestration, intelligent routing and communication components. Supports dynamic deployment and lifecycle management of integration services across large, distributed systems.

Lightweight integration service hosting environment

Lightweight integration service containers run in JVM. No JEE-application-server runtime dependency. Small memory footprint (20-25Mb, depending on the number of hosted services) remains static.

Centrally managed remote deployment

Allows communication brokers, integration service containers, and services to be deployed and managed from anywhere on the network, even across WAN links, security domains, and firewalls. Provides full location transparency for freedom of physical deployment in remote sites, thereby facilitating optimal use of computing and network resources.

Sonic Deployment Manager
(sold separately)

For large distributed environments, Sonic Deployment Manager automates the installation of Sonic products and tailors configurations to suit each stage of the project lifecycle. Sonic Deployment Manager reduces the time and cost of project development and delivery.

Independently scalable integration services

Services are independently scalable within and across service containers. Integration services scale independently of communication brokers. Allows cost-efficient, fine-grained scaling of individual services as required to meet changing throughput demands. Additional integration service instances and service containers are dynamically provisioned at runtime (no restart required). Behavior is the same for provided and custom-built hosted services.

Enterprise messaging communications backbone

Configurable qualities of service (delivery modes), including guaranteed message delivery

Includes semantics of at-least-once, at-most-once, exactly-once, in-order, and best-effort. Guaranteed message delivery eliminates need for service to manage re-transmission of data if receiving services are unavailable.

Rich publish-subscribe messaging semantics

Allows message broadcasting and/or unique messaging between services, enabling any number of applications to receive important information simultaneously. Hierarchically organized topics simplify efficient distribution of information and event notification to groups of interested parties.

High-throughput, low-latency, reliable message delivery

Delivers industry-leading high performance with a lower cost of hardware for given throughput requirement–including high-volume/high-availability scenarios (durable, persistent) and high quality-of-service scenarios (durable, persistent, transacted). Capable of sending 10,000 persistent messages per second with a single broker running on a two processor system.

Continuous Availability Architecture "Fast-Forward" Mode (CAA-FF):

• Leverages Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture (CAA) to provide the high availability and transactional fault tolerance without performance degradation associated with persistent message disk writes.
• Replicates recovery information to a standby broker; non-persistent messages can survive broker failure–unlike traditional high-availability solutions which require writing a recovery log to local disk.

Sonic ESB can also take advantage of more traditional hardware-based, fault-tolerant architectures.

Secure communications

Ensures secure transmission of data within ESB and to connected services. Supports WS-Security, HTTP-S, SSL, X.509 certificates, pluggable cipher suites, and embedded RSA encryption support through B-Safe.

Communication infrastructure scalability

Allows communication broker to dynamically scale by adding brokers to form clusters that transparently share topics and queues. No specific limit on the number of machines in a cluster: clusters have been tested to in excess of 64 machines. No restriction that these machines reside on the same LAN segment. Clusters may be connected through patented Dynamic Routing Architecture (DRA), which provides a single namespace with the ability to restrict that namespace to specific nodes in the distributed backbone or to support federated management/security. Topologies may be as simple as service communications brokered through a single communication broker (a hub-and-spoke topology), a fault-tolerant cluster of brokers (for high availability and greater processing capacity), or linked clusters (with traffic dynamically routed between them). Any of these topologies fully supports dynamic provisioning (no restart required) of integration services, service orchestration, and underlying communication brokers.

High availability (unique Continuous Availability Architecture—CAA)

Provides rapid communications broker failover transparent to services. Ensures that in-flight transactions are not rolled back. Provides these benefits without expensive RAID, OS clustering software, or third-party HA frameworks in the messaging layer. Employs real-time replication to keep the standby system continuously synchronized with the state of the primary system. Maintains transactional state across failures. Guarantees in-order delivery of messages even in the event of clustered broker failure—a unique Sonic feature. Platform independence supports— failover across heterogeneous systems.

Sonic ESB can also take advantage of more traditional hardware-based fault tolerance architectures.

Non-persistent high availability (CAA-FF) provides unique, industry-leading performance option

Continuous Availability Architecture "Fast-Forward" Mode (CAA-FF):

• Leverages network-based replication of Sonic CAA to provide high availability and transactional fault tolerance without performance degradation associated with persistent message disk writes.
• Replicates recovery information to a standby broker; non-persistent messages can survive broker failure—unlike traditional high-availability solutions which require writing a recovery log to local disk.

Automatic cross-cluster routing (Dynamic Routing Architecture—DRA)

Automatically routes cross-cluster data and intelligent routed event flows. Allows extension of network to additional LAN segments and remote sites without manual gateway reconfiguration. Supports global namespace for service endpoints. Cross-cluster JMS protocols are optimized for high-latency characteristics of WAN connections and provide error-free performance over frame-relay, satellite links, and dialup connections.

DMZ deployment

Provides secure and reliable communication across firewalls. Incoming messages are queued inside DMZ for pull-delivery systems within the firewall, protecting security by preventing system invocations from the outside. Full security, including certificate support, is built in for trusted connections across the Internet, satellite systems and other WANs.

Multi-protocol support

JMS and Web services: SOAP 1.1, WSDL, UDDI, XML Schema. (Jan 2004 OASIS, June 2003, July 2002), WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-ReliableMessaging Policy, WS-PolicyAttachments. In addition to standard TCP socket connectivity, supports SSL, HTTP, and HTTP-S, useful for creating virtual messaging networks over the Internet.

Flexible, pluggable security infrastructure

Uses any number of existing enterprise security infrastructures. Provides comprehensive, pluggable authentication, authorization, and encryption capabilities across the ESB.

Intelligent routing

Intelligent routing ("ESB Process") provides highly-scalable, end-to-end control of event flows-- across distributed environment

Adds routing-slip state ("ESB itinerary") to business data such that they flow together across network for distributed processing. Executes across multiple servers, clusters, and security domains, yet can be deployed and debugged from anywhere on the network. Scales with underlying communications infrastructure to deliver highly reliable and continuously available processing of large numbers of concurrent active routes--obviating performance bottleneck of hub-and-spoke orchestration models.

Flexible, rules-driven routing control

Supports configurable subject-, content-, and itinerary-based routing of messages to services on the ESB. Intelligent routing applies XPATH on XML documents, a JavaScript rule on arbitrary messages, or uses routing-slip state ("ESB itinerary") to route the data intelligently across the enterprise. Processing steps can be service invocations, endpoints, a Web service, or another intelligent route. Dynamic routing context, embedded in the Sonic ESB message structure, determines the processing state and is available for inspection by integration services. Allows dynamic override of configured endpoints based on contiguity and/or load balancing.

Split-join services

Allows multiple intelligent routes to be invoked in parallel and the results aggregated as message parts within a message. Maintains overall message flow when processing a message comprising multiple elements, each of which may require different processing. Supports highly scalable request/response services that invoke multiple back-end systems.

Management domain spans firewall, security domains

Federated management environment

Provides single management domain namespace with the ability to restrict that namespace to specific nodes in the distributed backbone or to support federated management and security. Leverages Dynamic Routing Architecture (DRA) to route data across domains, physical networks, and corporate boundaries without requiring manual network configuration changes when adding additional clusters to the network. Allows integration services and distributed service orchestration to be defined and deployed from a single console and to be monitored as they seamlessly execute across cluster/LAN/WAN/security domain boundaries.

Spans multiple security domains

Fully supports multiple security authentication domains within an ESB. Provides the ability to mix and match these domains, without compromising security: for example, if one organization uses a centrally administered LDAP system for authentication, another organization can apply a custom approach or would can manage authentication in a different manner.

Configuration repository

Sonic ESB includes a configuration repository which is accessed by the Progress® Sonic Workbench™ ESB development environment and ESB runtime components--ensuring that the tools and components share a common, consistent view of the system. Keeps in sync with local caches via a "configuration change'" notification event that alerts containers to changes in the central configuration repository and allows them to refresh their local caches. Able to be configured in a master-slave, fault tolerant configuration to provide high levels of resilience and availability. At runtime, the configuration data is selectively cached by each Sonic ESB container to protect the system against a failure of the central configuration repository or loss of access (e.g., due to network failure).

ESB configuration artifact (integration service/service orchestration) lifecycle

Sonic ESB repository promotion model is fully configurable. Each lifecycle stage (development, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, production, etc.) can support any number of simultaneously available versions--with only one version as the "default" active version at each stage. Any revision can be migrated between lifecycle stages without needing to be activated in that stage, and the same revision can be available in different lifecycle stages (but may be active on one and staged in another). This allows users, for example, to stage versions in a lifecycle stage or roll forward/backwards between versions in any given lifecycle stage without having to transition across lifecycle stages. The transition of versions between lifecycle stages can be handled by Sonic ESB or driven by an external configuration management system (with policy versions stored in the configuration management system between lifecycle stages). The second approach is often fully automated: machines are configured automatically using scripts based on configurations loaded from a configuration management system.

ESB configuration import/export

Imports and exports any configuration artifact including UML models, WSDL, XSLT, etc.

External UDDI interoperability

Provides for design-time integration with an external UDDI registry when locating and invoking Web services.

Mediation: Easily integrates services representing diverse technologies, without modifying underlying applications or introducing inflexible, hard-coded dependencies. Dynamically re-configures service relationships without disturbing running services.

Transport, protocol, and interaction model mediation

Mediates disparate technologies and semantics to allow service interactions without modifying services themselves. Interaction models include synchronous and asynchronous invocation, publish and subscribe, intelligent routing, and BPEL service orchestration (Progress® Sonic BPEL Server™, sold separately).

Content-based routing

Configurable XPATH subject- and content-based routing of messages to services. Allows users to flexibly define and modify routing rules without coding. Optional override of content-based routing service with custom service.

Intelligent routing

See discussion in Distributed Architecture section.

XML message transformation, splitting, aggregation, and enrichment

Mediates incompatibilities of XML message format and granularity among services using distributed XSLT transformation services. Provides facilities to merge data from various services, as well as to split data and route it to various destinations through standards-based XSLT and XPath.

Error tracking

Provides a full debug and testing environment for transformations, together with error tracking, at runtime.

Other pre-built infrastructure services

Contains a number of pre-built infrastructure services and components, including logging, message tracking, and numerous tools for creating and testing services, and service artifacts (style sheets, XQuery statements, SQL statements, etc.)

Service orchestration

Sonic BPEL Server
(sold separately)

Adds standards-based service orchestration to the intelligent-routing capabilities of Sonic ESB. Through a drag-and-drop GUI in Sonic's Eclipse-based Workbench, improves developer productivity by enabling service composition and event correlation with minimal programming. Leverages the reliability, flexibility, and reach of Sonic ESB to meet large-scale integration requirements, while preserving 100% native BPEL portability With patent-pending distributed debugging technology, Sonic makes it easy to develop, test, and deploy any combination of BPEL, intelligent routing, and integration services.

Connectivity: A broad set of on-ramps to the ESB

Web services

Provides native Web services support, i.e., the ability to call external Web services and easily map input and output parameters from the incoming and outgoing XML documents involved in the integration scenario. Using the ESB to integrate with Web services introduces enterprise quality of service to any Web services environment, providing additional reliability, scalability, and security for Web services-enabled applications. Supports SOAP 1.1, WSDL, XML Schema. WS-Security (Jan 2004 OASIS, June 2003, July 2002).

Advanced Web services

Defines contracts for communications; allows for asynchronous replies and fault handling, exactly-once, in-order message delivery, authentication, signing, and encryption. Supports WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-Security Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging Policy, WS-Policy Attachments.

Enterprise messaging clients

Provides C/C++, C#, Java, and COM clients for the most direct and highest performance connectivity.

JEE, .NET application connectivity

Simplifies application server connectivity to ESB. Supports JEE and .NET containers as endpoints. Connects to EJBs via MDBs or JCA. Connects to .NET using native C#/C/C++ clients.

Progress OpenEdge application connectivity

Simplifies connectivity of Progress® OpenEdge® applications to ESB. Native support within OpenEdge for Sonic ESB exposes OpenEdge application components as services on the ESB without coding. OpenEdge applications can also connect via JMS.

Database Service
sold separately)

Simplifies access and reuse of relational data sources. Provides service-oriented access to relational data sources. Accesses relational data and connects to any JDBC-enabled database, with out-of-the-box support for Progress OpenEdge RDBMS, IBM DB2, IBM Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle DBMS, and Sybase ASE.

Adapters for ESB
(sold separately)

Reduces time and cost to service-enable and integrate proprietary technologies with open standards. Exposes adapter technology from iWay Software, Adaptris and Pervasive Software as service endpoints on the ESB. Adapters for Sonic ESB connect packaged applications (including SAP/R3, Oracle JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft [now Oracle], Siebel Systems, Manugistics, Vantive [now Oracle], etc.); B2B (AS1, AS2, AS3, Secure FTP, ebXML); message-oriented middleware; and legacy technologies. Also supports CORBA/IIOP, RMI, ATMI, COM, .NET, Tuxedo. Also supports SOAP over SSL and SOAP over JMS. Adapters for EDI connectivity include ANSI X12, EDIFACT, SWIFT/SWIFTML, FIX/FIXML, HIPAA, HL7, XBRL, XCBL, etc. Supports X25, AS1, etc. through third-party adapters and implementation services.

Mainframe connectivity (Progress® Shadow® sold separately)

Provides connectivity to mainframe data sources and applications by exposing them as Web services or via JDBC drivers. A native mainframe component runs "on host" and connects the Web services or SQL calls to the appropriate target mainframe applications (CICS, Natural, IMS/TM) or data sources (VSAM, IMS/DB, Adabas, DB2). Supports both transactional and user interface models. Also provides adapters for mainframe connectivity including CICS, IMS/TM, Adabas, ISAM, IMS, VSAM, LU, WebsphereMQ, and 3270 Terminal Adapter. Exposes these adapters as endpoints on the ESB.

File connectivity

Supports file, FTP (inbound and outbound), email protocols including POP3 and SMTP, and ZIP/tar formats.

Message-oriented middleware connectivity

Supports WebSphereMQ, TIBCO Software RDV, and other JMS implementations through JMS bridging. In addition to SOAP over HTTP, natively supports SOAP over JMS.

Caching: (Progress® Sonic XML Server™ sold separately)

Fast processing and storage of in-flight XML data

Provides fast processing and storage of in-flight XML data--commonly used to provide rapid access to operational data for display in a portal. Provides fast processing of XML messages in their native XML format without imposing restrictions on XML message schema. Provides ideal operational data cache and aggregation service: deployable anywhere on the Sonic ESB to enhance performance or support data warehousing, business event management, auditing, and non-repudiation applications.

Deployment, Management, Monitoring and Security

Control and change management: The behavior of Sonic ESB is configuration-driven versus programmatic or script-driven. The configuration metadata can be changed at runtime, dynamically affecting ESB behavior.

Distributed service container architecture

Provides a managed, lightweight container that hosts ESB services in distributed environments. Industry-standard JMX framework allows administrators to remotely start, stop, and reload ESB services in containers, even when deployed in other departments or security domains or across a firewall.

Remote/centralized configuration and monitoring—from a single consol

Ability to manage a large deployment, using Sonic Deployment Manager, from a single console that:

• Uses JMX-based framework for managing ESB infrastructure and integration services.
• Collects and aggregates notifications and metrics, allowing instantaneous and full operational visibility into containers running in any location.
• Provides native ESB monitoring and management integrated with the Sonic toolset.
• Also integrates with a broad range of enterprise management environments (e.g., HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, IBM Tivoli)

Staged deployment

Simplifies managing integration service and service orchestration upgrades in large-scale SOA deployments. Supports deployment and migration of integration services and service orchestration from development, to test, to deployment environments. Performs impact and dependency analysis on changes before migration. Sonic ESB development tools and Sonic Deployment Manager (sold separately) support 100% of the service lifecycle, including creating and testing services, deploying and configuring them in a production environment, and, finally, managing them within that environment.

Remote/centralized configuration and monitoring—from a single console

Ability to manage a large deployment from a single console that:

• Uses JMX-based framework for managing ESB infrastructure and integration services.
• Collects and aggregates notifications and metrics, allowing instantaneous and full operational visibility into containers running in any location.
• Provides native ESB monitoring and management integrated with the Sonic toolset.
• Also integrates with a broad range of enterprise management environments (e.g., HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, IBM Tivoli)

Staged deployment

Simplifies managing integration service and service orchestration upgrades in large-scale SOA deployments. Supports deployment and migration of integration services and service orchestration from development, to test, to deployment environments. Performs impact and dependency analysis on changes before migration. Sonic ESB development tools support 100% of the service lifecycle, including creating and testing services, deploying and configuring them in a production environment, and, finally, managing them within that environment.

Distributed process debugger (patent pending)

Dramatically simplifies development, testing, and debugging in a distributed SOA environment. From the Eclipse-based Sonic Workbench environment, a developer can set breakpoints and seamlessly step to and from a BPEL process, into an ESB intelligent route, into an integration service, and so forth, regardless of the physical location of the execution.

Infrastructure service-level agreement (SLA) management and monitoring (sold separately)

Progress Actional (sold separately):

• Provides complementary management and monitoring of Sonic ESB infrastructure, adding only microseconds of latency to system operations.
• Captures key aggregate and per-transaction statistics including service invocations, service orchestration tracking, performance, volume, SLA violations.
• Generates statistics based on the message processing path.

Monitoring and SLAs

Centralized auditing and logging service

Monitors and diagnoses behaviors of complex distributed systems. Centralizes logging and auditing of services, errors, service orchestration status, etc. Supports log4j plug-in architecture. Audit logs can be integrated into a single log file. Integration with logging from other applications can be done via the integrated messaging.

Technical monitoring

Sonic ESB provides graphical tools and programmatic facilities for tracking and monitoring both intelligent routing and BPEL service orchestration instances. Progress® Actional® (sold separately) provides the ability to track, measure, and apply business, security, compliance, and operational policies to end-to-end processes across and beyond Sonic ESB infrastructure.

Graphical management and monitoring (sold separately)

Progress Actional (sold separately) provides a graphical console that displays technical and business statistics and dynamically traces business process flow across Sonic ESB and into the infrastructure to which it connects. Rather than require that all dashboards be predefined by developers or analysts, Actional provides a complete self-service model with built-in views that allows users to navigate and drill down among only the subset of the information that they have rights to--enabling them to customize their own dashboards and views without violating the security requirements for information access. The self-service security administration model allows administrators to declaratively define a user's access filtered by service or business process or according to business context such as customer, business unit, region, etc. This access model is not only implemented at the UI level but at the API level as well. All information that is available via the dashboard UIs can also be accessed via secured Web services. The rights of the Web service user (as per the above filtering description) determine exactly which information can be accessed. As a result, external enterprise dashboards can be constructed without compromising security.

SLA management
(sold separately)

Progress Actional (sold separately):

• Provides the ability to enforce SLAs between a service consumer and publisher, send performance alerts, and log service performance characteristics such as throughput, errors, invocations, response time.
• Allows SLAs to be defined (and statistics tracked) according to both service performance and business context: by customer, channel, region, business unit, manufacturing plant, etc.
• Includes the ability to change the behavior of rules, such as routing rules, dynamically based on the operational state (e.g., automatically reroute gold customers to an alternate data center when the SLA for gold customers is getting close to its limit).
• Includes the ability to apply management policies to either individual requests (e.g., alert me and audit the request if its response time exceeds 16 seconds) or to aggregates (e.g., change the routing behavior if the average response time for high-value transactions exceeds 8 seconds).
• When an operational alert is detected, takes a snapshot of the entire transaction path (even the parts of the transaction path that occur before the issue is recognized) for later analysis--with no measurable impact on the performance of the running system

Business monitoring and reporting (sold separately)

Progress Actional (sold separately):

• Is able to create, aggregate, and calculate key KPI data (key performance indicators), which may include not only discrete values, but also values auto-classified by other business criteria as well (e.g., dollar amount sold by customer, order-to-fulfillment time by warehouse, etc.) without having to individually configure each discrete value.
• Stores captured reporting data in an external relational database and can present this through pre-defined and customizable displays.
• Is able to generate other reports directly from the underlying data store using third-party external reporting tools.

Problem alerting, drill-down, resolution (sold separately)

Progress Actional (sold separately):

• Detects error conditions based on policy violations, whose conditions can include a combination of technical metrics (e.g., message size, elapsed time, etc.), content of a message, and context about a message (e.g., security credentials, time-of-day, etc.).
• Once an alert is generated, allows administrators to directly drill down into relevant audit and technical logs.
• Captures a snapshot of the entire transaction path (as described under service management), including every step along the way, every metric associated with each part of the path, and even which exact instances in any clusters that the transaction went through.

Third-party security/management integration

Third-party technical monitoring

Fully supports third-party system administration tools such as OpenView, Unicenter, Tivoli, etc.

Pluggable security infrastructure and integration

Flexibility to use any number of existing enterprise security infrastructures. Supports encryption from RSA built-in. Provides comprehensive, pluggable authentication, authorization, and encryption capabilities across the ESB. Progress Actional (sold separately) provides support for multiple forms of credentials, including username/password and SAML 1.1 with identity propagation and credential mapping.

Management of distributed environment from any point on the network

Provides a managed, lightweight container model that allows complete control in distributed environments. Managed through a standards-based JMX approach. Enables administrators to remotely start, stop, and reload integration services from a centralized management console. Also allows notifications and metrics to be collected and aggregated in a central location, enabling instantaneous and full operational visibility into the entire ESB infrastructure.

One-click deployment

Supports "one click" deployment of integration services and service orchestration to a test environment for rapid test and debugging of configurations prior to deployment to a production system. Simplifies deployment by the use of a graphical deployment tool that:

• Handles issues such as referential integrity and consistency of the deployed configurations.
• Provides impact analysis information and dependency reports to ensure that the deployment of new integration services and service orchestration does not affect existing operations.

Eclipse-based SOA development environment

Sonic ESB development is done in Sonic Workbench, an Eclipse-based SOA development environment for modeling, configuring, testing, and deploying integration services, intelligent routing, and BPEL service orchestration using products in the Sonic ESB Product Family. Its graphical environment makes it easy to model service orchestration and intelligent routing and, subsequently, to specify configuration and deployment details, supporting an intuitive "top-down" approach to the SOA development lifecycle

Distributed test and debugging tools

Allows developers to rapidly configure and test integration services, intelligent routes, and service orchestration locally and then deploy and debug them in the network using real-time tracking and step-through debugging tools.

Part of a bigger family

Sonic ESB is the foundation of the Sonic ESB Product Family™, which extends Sonic ESB with standards-based service orchestration, operational data management, and integration of third-party relational data sources, packaged applications, and technologies. Sonic ESB also leverages additional products from Progress Software, including Progress® Actional® products for SOA management, Progress® DataXtend™ SI for semantic integration, and Progress® DataDirect Shadow® for mainframe integration.

Runs in a JVM—No application server required

The Sonic ESB runtime only requires a standard JVM and so can run wherever a standard JVM can run. This includes operating system or network services. Given these minimal dependencies, Sonic ESB containers can also run in devices such as network appliances.

Low memory requirements

Sonic ESB components require much less memory than application server-based integration approaches. The ESB service container requires only 20-25Mb, depending on the number of services deployed in each container, and memory usage is fundamentally static. The multi-protocol communications broker requires 50-60Mb (100-120Mb on 64-bit architectures); memory usage fluctuates depending on message traffic.

Fine-grained service deployment control

Allows organizations to deploy what they need, when and where they need it.

Cross-platform communication broker clustering

Supports the formation of communication broker clusters across different platforms, providing deployment flexibility.