- Meet the Family!
- Typical Usages of Appliances
- A Closer Look at the DataPower Products
- DataPower as a Member of the Network Infrastructure
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
DataPower as a Member of the Network Infrastructure
At their physical core, the DataPower appliances are network devices. Certainly, by looking at them, this would be one’s presumption. In Figure 1.1, the most apparent feature is the set of four network interface jacks on the front of the appliance. On the appliance, these are labeled MGMT, ETH0, ETH1, and ETH2. They can be split up any way you choose; for example, it is common to dedicate the Management port to the administrative subnet. From there, the remaining three can be split up so that two receive client traffic and the third connects to the backend private network, thereby segregating the network data for network security.
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There are also a number of network protocols supported on the appliance. These include HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, NFS, MQ, MQ/SSL, JMS, and Tibco EMS for application traffic, and SNMP, SMTP, sFTP, and others for administrative usage.
We’ve mentioned SNMP a few times, which is ubiquitous and useful for infrastructure monitoring. The appliance comes with SNMP MIB files that can be imported into your monitoring tools to set up monitoring policies, and the appliances can send out SNMP traps when critical events occur. Monitoring can also be achieved by using SOAP, as is the case with the integration with Tivoli ITCAM for SOA (see Figure 1-9). There are also objects built in that are useful for monitoring and auditing, such as message count and duration monitors and sophisticated service-level management tools. Most logging is done off-device, utilizing protocols such as syslog and syslog-NG, or by writing logs to a remote NFS mount. (DataPower never shares its own file system, but can connect to shared file systems on other servers.) There is a full suite of logging formats and protocols for your use, as well as a model for specifying event notifications on various levels of granularity.
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Figure 1-9 Monitoring DataPower appliances with Tivoli ITCAM for SOA.
Included with the appliances is a utility for managing multiple devices, ITCAM SE for DataPower, which is based on a cut-down version of the Tivoli ITCAM product built on the Tivoli Enterprise™ Monitoring Server (TEMS). This fat-client utility is installed on a server or workstation and enables appliances to be grouped into managed sets in order to keep their firmware levels and configurations in sync. This can be used to cluster application proxies for high availability and better levels of service. It also backs up the configurations when it detects changes.
Similar management features are also included in the WAS 7.0 administrative console. Both utilities are covered in Chapter 29, “Multiple Device Management Tools.”