Cisco Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module Libro blanco
Solution Overview
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Automating Web Services Security and Acceleration with
Cisco ACE Application Switch and Cisco ACE XML Gateway
Cisco ACE Application Switch and Cisco ACE XML Gateway
What You Will Learn
As more and more enterprises deploy Web-based applications to reduce costs, increase
efficiency, and shorten service delivery time frames, Web 2.0 and service-oriented architecture
(SOA) technologies
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are becoming ubiquitous. These technologies provide exceptional application
flexibility, but they also create new challenges of scale, performance, and security.
Approaching these challenges from an applications perspective, Cisco
®
provides an integrated
solution that enables our customers to automate Web services security, scalability, and
performance improvements.
As described in this document, using the industry-leading Cisco ACE Application Control Engine
application switch and Cisco ACE XML Gateway together, enterprises can easily automate these
tasks, thus reducing the time and costs associated with configuration tasks while minimizing
deployment complexity and risk.
Challenge
Today customers typically deploy Extensible Markup Language (XML) gateways in the data center
as a front-end to application servers hosting XML applications and Web services. As traffic is sent
from clients to the data center application servers, it passes through the XML gateway to secure,
offload, and accelerate message processing for XML traffic. Because today’s XML gateways do
not provide complete Layer 4 to Layer 7 application switching capabilities, XML gateways must be
deployed in tandem with application switching platforms.
In typical implementations, the application switch and XML gateway are deployed as separate
entities with no knowledge of each other. The application switch is unaware of the Web services
traffic being processed by the XML gateway. At the same time, the XML gateway is unaware of the
application switching services being provided by the application switch.
As a result, inserting an XML gateway for Web services processing requires the administrator to
manually configure application switching policies on the application switch to help ensure that Web
services traffic is properly directed to the XML gateway. Additional application switching policies
must be configured to enable the application switch to properly load balance the Web services
traffic among the servers. This process can be very complex, time consuming, and error prone.
The Integrated Cisco ACE and Cisco ACE XML Gateway Solution
The Cisco ACE application switch and Cisco ACE XML Gateway platforms have been designed to
work together to automate and simplify Web services security and acceleration. Using an XML
API, the Cisco ACE and Cisco ACE XML Gateway no longer are isolated and separate entities.
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These technologies include, but are not limited to, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and the Extensible
Markup Language (XML).