IIB for Everyone: Affordable Integration Summary: Industry leading ESB for around AUD$15,000 1. Don t waste time and money building a cheap solution when IIB Express offers affordable integration now. Integration engines have a reputation for being expensive enterprise components that are complex to install and hard to use. While most large enterprises have some form of integration engine, it s a myth that it has to be expensive. IBM Integration Bus (IIB - formerly WebSphere Message Broker) serves as an Enterprise Service Bus for many of the world s major corporations and government departments. IIB comes in three editions with price tags to cater for all sizes of organisation: 1. Advanced Edition heavyweight features for large organisations. 2. Standard Edition full-featured integration for mid-range organisations. 3. Express Edition affordable integration for any sized organisation. This article will discuss IIB Express, highlight how it enables an organisation to be more flexible and show you why it represents such great value. 1 Contact Certus for a quote
What is Integration? Integration can simply be thought of as the joining together of different systems. This may be passing messages from one system to the other, or exposing the data of one system, as a web service, for systems or people to consume. Enterprise Service Bus is a core pattern of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The benefits of SOA are well understood. They enable an organisation to react to changing business conditions quickly by reusing existing services rather than beginning a full-blown development every time something new is required. What business problems are ESBs solving? In modern organisations data has more value if it is shared between systems. Silos of information are an opportunity wasted and lead to inefficiencies. Using an ESB, an organisation can liberate data from silos, join together their systems and have a real-time view of the business throughout their architecture. This results in cost savings and higher accuracy as data is entered only once.
Where does IIB fit in? IIB is an ESB. It enables an organisation to route integration traffic through it in a fast, reliable and resilient manner. Typical use-cases 1. An organisation purchases a new Warehouse Management System and wants to exchange data to and from the Financial System. 2. A legacy system contains data that the business would like to expose to the company website. 3. A Business Partner is sending in data in a particular format and it needs to be inserted into a database. IIB has a stable, mature runtime into which integration flows are deployed. These flows represent logic that may implement a use-case such as above. Competition The main competition to IIB Express comes from a few vendors: 1. Microsoft BizTalk 2. Apache Camel / Fuse ESB 3. Mulesoft ESB 4. Oracle SOA Suite None of them can match IIB Express for value. While some competitors are showing their age and are now out of their depth (Biztalk), others have plenty of capability but require a lot of configuration and tuning (Camel). Integration Framework vs ESB One trap to watch out for is using an Integration Framework like Apache Camel. This is a great framework, but it isn t an ESB. An Integration Framework provides a consistent way of implementing integration tasks that at first glance is very attractive to most organisations. However it misses out on many of the key features that are provided by an ESB such as Transactions, Monitoring, Failover, and Developer Toolkits. The result is that a lot of developer effort and cost is expended to get to the point where IIB Express starts.
Virtual Machines Another trap is around the use of Virtual Machines. IBM only charges for the processor cores that the product uses. So if you have an 8-core VM host with a VM using a single core, IBM will only count the one core, whereas Oracle will count all eight. Licensed Environments and Developer Toolkits IIB offers a free of charge Developer Edition. Unlike many open source community editions, IIB Developer Edition is full function and binary identical to all the other IIB Editions. With the flick of a switch its mode can be changed to Express, Standard or Advanced. IIB Developer Edition is limited only in terms of performance and cannot be used for production purposes whilst running in the free Developer mode. IIB licensing terms and conditions mean that once you have purchased production licenses you only require licenses to those environments that feature performance/scalability testing or the simulation of production workloads. Traditional development and test environments are entitlements included with the production licensing. Compare this to the open source approach of charging support and subscription for all environments and all developer licenses. Often the community edition won t cut it. The moment a developer needs to make use of a feature that is not in the community edition, support and subscription will be required for this environment. And don t forget disaster recovery. There is no charge by IBM for cold DR environments. Entitlements Included IIB Express edition includes entitlement to WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Extreme Scale cache for use in conjunction with IIB integration use cases. In an open source world adding this capability to your integration stack will add to your support and subscription charges.
Local Partners IBM and IIB in particular have a strong local partner base. Certus has been specialising in IIB for over a decade and has a history of successful projects throughout Australia and New Zealand. We have a large team of integration consultants who can advise on IIB and enable you to rapidly realise value. Many competitors have one or two resources locally but most of their resources are off-shore. You may get support when you purchase, but will that help you when you need it in the future? Room to grow IIB Express is the starting point in the IBM ESB offerings. It will provide a fullfeatured integration environment for you now and allow you to grow into the more advanced editions over time. The same code you write for IIB Express will run perfectly in IIB Standard or Advanced. Key features Performance IIB has been proven to perform better than its competition. IBM publishes annual performance reports that highlight the performance characteristics of IIB. None of the competition does this. IBM Labs have shown that IIB requires fewer runtime instances, fewer environments, less hardware, lower administration and reduced management compared to the competition. Unlike many Java EE based runtimes, you don t have to employ highly skilled administrators to tune IIB. Its default configuration will scale and handle thousands of transactions per second. Reliability Big corporations choose IIB for a reason. It is a highly reliable product that reduces their risk. It has a built-in failover feature called multi-instance. This provides a level of uptime usually reserved for companies purchasing dedicated highly available (HA) solutions. IIB is built on top of WebSphere MQ, the industry leading messaging platform. This provides persistence of your messages and ensures that if a server crashes, the message will not be lost.
HA, multi-instance IIB nodes run warm and are only charged at 1/5 th of a full IIB Advanced or Standard edition license. In fact in certain configuration with IIB Express edition no additional licensing is required at all to include these HA nodes. Graphical tools IIB allows a developer to drop nodes that represent certain actions onto a flow. An example would be a node that reads from a Message Queue. This could be connected to a Graphical Map node that transforms from one format to another. It could be followed by a File Output node that sends the transformed message to an FTP server. Language choice Typically the logic in an integration flow will involve some code. Many ESBs tie a developer down to use just one code language. IIB on the other hand allows a developer to code in ESQL, Java,.Net or PHP. This flexibility is unrivalled in the integration space and means that all of your developers are able to participate, regardless of their particular specialty. Patterns based development Instead of reinventing the wheel each time a flow is developed, IIB developers can make use of patterns. These are templates representing best-practice implementations of common use-cases that can be deployed via configuration. An example would be a SOAP service access pattern. Instead of creating a new flow from scratch a developer can provide the WSDL for the SOAP service and the IIB Toolkit will build the flow based on the pattern. An intuitive, wizard driven Pattern Authoring environment is included in the IIB toolkit. This allows a lead integration developer/design to set the best practice approach to integration for is organisation. The pattern templates created extend the Pattern Explorer used by the development team. These pattern templates form a binding contract between the lead designer and his team. This approach accelerates delivery and drives out errors and provides the team with a simplified integration framework to develop in, which is underpinned by the IIB ESB.
Out of the box monitoring Unlike many competitors, IIB comes with an out-of-the-box monitoring solution that allows an IT support team to track the progress of messages through IIB and back, and to watch how the flows perform in real-time. Monitoring such as this can be a huge time saver to an IT team looking for errors. DevOps Certus best-practice is to use IIB in a DevOps environment. Our consultants are skilled in using IIB s build scripts to create, configure and deploy artifacts using tools such as Rational UrbanCode or Atlassian Bamboo. This approach improves the quality of the deployments, removes human error and provides reassurance of what has been deployed. Cost IIB Express can be purchased for about AUD$15,000 for a simple one node configuration based on a single core. This includes all of the Messaging, Tooling, Monitoring and Runtime discussed above. For an active/active configuration (i.e. two servers) providing High Availability and high-throughput the cost is about AUD$30,000 for production. IBM makes this even more attractive as they do not charge for non-production instances (as long as they don t process Production Load i.e. Performance Test). This means that you can have a range of environments from DEV, TEST, and QA etc. that are covered by your production entitlement.
Conclusion Compare the cost of IIB Express to the cost of developing with the competition. You may find cheaper offerings, but you will spend big to get them to a base level of functionality that IIB Express offers out of the box. Spend your money wisely and start with IIB Express. It s affordable integration. To find out more please contact Damian Harvey, Practice Lead on +612 9437 3000.