DataPower will not allow modified firmwares to be uploaded to the machine. They are required to be signed by IBM.

By default, the device is ‘completely off’ with a locked down configuration. It’s up to the administrator to enable relevant services.

When something is in encrypted storage, there is no UI to get the information off of it. There is apparently some kind of special hardware device that will allow access should something go wrong.

“near-wirespeed” is now the en-vogue term when talking about performance. I’ve noticed that the marketing lingo has changed from “wirespeed” since that would be technically impossible (no delay transforms).

“The XI50 is one of IBM’s three ESB products.” I find this interesting because IBM likes to play down the ESB functionality of the DataPower box in favour of the WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know my opinions on the subject.

DataPower boxes in a cluster can recognize each other and have the ability to control traffic flow as a community. This is primarily used to enforce Service Lifecycle Management (SLMs).

DataPower supports WTX (WebSphere Transformation Extender) and Contivo (sp?)  for mapping XML to Binary via the DataGlue engine.

‘DataGlue’ : No one was sure if this is actually an engine or just marketecture to describe the XML-Binary transformation work.

DataPower can also do content based routing, which puts it at direct competition with WebSphere Business Services Fabric as well. Actually, it’s one-up on WBSF since DataPower can do transformations. WBSF has to defer to the WebSphere Process Server runtime for that capability.

Can leverage the XML-PI (processing instruction) to modify XML data.

First break.