Tony Kourlas
Director, Service Provider Strategy
Solace Systems

In the enterprise, the move from centralized data architectures to more flexible approaches based on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is straining application and messaging servers that must deal with ever-increasing inter-application message rates, volumes, and application integration complexity. Traditional solutions, including faster software, more servers at the network edge, and more staff to administer them, do not resolve the scale and performance issues inherent in these demanding environments. Most of these solutions drive up capital expenses (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX) and impose substantial complexity and other limitations on the corporate network. Enterprises need the ability to deploy application infrastructure as a high-speed, highly available service that can be shared by all applications. Content-aware networks fill this role.

Today's middleware/enterprise service bus (ESB) solutions often require racks of servers and special-purpose software to manage high-volume information flow. A content-aware network embeds that capability directly in a shared network infrastructure, accomplishing for application networks what traditional IP routers did for transmission control protocol (TCP)/IP networks. Whereas IP routers were optimized for IP header lookups and packet forwarding, content-aware networks are optimized for filtering, forwarding, and transforming inter-application messages on the basis of their content and context. A content-aware network deployed as an overlay to an existing IP infrastructure provides the following substantial benefits to the enterprise:

• It allows distributed or SOA applications to share a single infrastructure that is on-demand in the network to filter, route, and transform information at volumes 10 to 100 times faster than traditional software middleware. Firms can invest in this shared content network infrastructure rather than create a new network for each major project or application, which reduces both CAPEX and OPEX.
• It frees application servers to focus on complex business rule execution or event processing and analysis.
• It provides true loose coupling where applications do not need to know about their counterparties. Content-aware networks resolve a major problem in messaging networks today-the requirement to coordinate between sender and receiver with a topic or subject name. Instead the receiver can simply specify what kind of content they want to receive using fine-grain content filtering.
• It executes in hardware, which virtually eliminates performance degradation when significant content filtering or routing occurs, assuring data latency is always low and predictable.