Vendors poke, prod XML traffic

Two vendors are touting new products designed to handle XML traffic - one to speed it along, and another to glean business intelligence from its payload.

Three-year-old DataPower Technology this week is announcing its first hardware product, the XA35 XML Accelerator. The box is designed to parse, filter and process XML content, off-loading that chore from servers.

Meanwhile, start-up Swingtide is making its corporate debut this week. The Portsmouth, N.H., company is working on software to help companies take advantage of business knowledge contained in XML documents. Its software, code-named Breakwater, will extract business information, such as how customers use a particular service, from XML documents.

Dealing with XML traffic is becoming more of an issue for companies, experts say. One gigabyte of database information can result in more than 20G bytes of XML-encoded information, and XML traffic levels are on the rise, according to research firm ZapThink.

"XML traffic is really inefficient," says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. "It's usually 10 times larger than what you could do equivalently with a binary file."

Not only is XML traffic less efficient, but its processing requirements also differ from switching and network protocol routing, Schmelzer says. Rather than simply scanning packet headers, XML-aware devices need to understand, parse, filter and process XML content, he says.

DataPower's goal is to keep XML traffic moving smoothly, speeding application response times. Its 1U (1.75 inch) device can be deployed in a data center either alongside application servers or downstream from load-balancing switches.

The Cambridge, Mass., company says its XA35, which starts at $55,000, accelerates XML processing by 1,000% or more.

That claim drew the attention of Hemscott, says Stephen Roche, CTO of the London business information and research company, which needs to get its custom reports to customers quickly and without delivery problems.

After migrating to an Oracle database and adopting XML as its corporate data standard, Hemscott found some customer requests for information were taking too long to process. One area that was particularly slow was a Web-based system for generating on-the-fly data reports that summarize what Hemscott knows about a company.

For these Web reports, Hemscott was pulling data from the Oracle database and translating it from XML to HTML to generate dynamic Web content. But the bulky transformations were bogging down servers.

"The XML to describe that amount of financial and business data for a company is pretty enormous," Roche says. "The time to transform the XML data into 15 pages of HTML was taking 10 to 15 seconds, which was way too slow. With the XA35, we've got that down to subsecond."

DataPower isn't the only vendor to devise XML hardware. Sarvega and Forum Systems announced XML-aware appliances for switching and securing XML traffic this year.

Whereas DataPower is about processing muscle, Swingtide is about extracting business intelligence from XML documents.

Two of Swingtide's founders, Jack Serfass and David Sweet, also founded Bowstreet, a Web services and XML pioneer that offers tools to automate the creation and maintenance of composite Web applications.

The experience of working through enterprise Web services deployments helped shape this latest venture, Serfass says.

"We really found the more we worked with XML that it was very much more a business-focused issue than a technology issue," says Serfass, Swingtide's chairman.

With its software, companies can start to understand how fast a network is, and how much business they are processing. "Since XML is free text you actually can get a tremendous amount of business knowledge just by watching the streams of XML flow across the network," Serfass says. "You start to be able to understand the business impact of your technology investment."

ZapThink's Schmelzer says the concept is interesting but that demand for management-oriented products such as Swingtide's won't really kick in until Web services and XML adoption increase.

RELATED LINKS