SOA Software, a leading SOA and cloud services governance provider, has announced the availability of version 6.0 of its Policy Manager for IBM WebSphere DataPower product. The product allows customers to transform their DataPower appliances into an enterprise-class SOA Infrastructure supporting both mainframe and distributed environments.

Policy Manager for IBM WebSphere DataPower provides a centralized configuration and management solution for DataPower. It allows customers to easily create and manage DataPower configurations for common security, transformation and integration use cases, offering:

• Service deployment and metadata configuration—automate the deployment of proxy (virtual) service and configuration metadata across DataPower appliances to reduce administrative overhead and ensure consistency
• Automated policy management—ensure consistent application of approved enterprise security and management policies across all service instances over a cluster of appliances
• Cluster management—manage groups of DataPower appliances as clusters, ensuring that they all share the same configuration with a single centralized management and monitoring console
• SLA monitoring and management—define, manage and monitor service level agreement policies for services deployed in single appliances or clusters of appliances
• Cryptographic key and certificate management—eliminate costly and risky manual processes by centralizing and automating the generation and management of the keys and certificates DataPower uses for message and transport signature and encryption
• Mainframe service definition and management—create and manage mainframe web services hosted in DataPower to enable efficient legacy application integration

"Policy Manager for DataPower allows customers to use DataPower as the foundation of their enterprise SOA infrastructure," said Alistair Farquharson, SOA Software chief technology officer. "With this solution, DataPower customers can realize the value of their investments in DataPower, with simple configuration and management for mainframe and distributed web services."

SOA Software's Policy Manager and Service Manager combine to provide an industry-leading operational governance solution for SOA and cloud services. Policy Manager provides an SOA Registry/Repository and comprehensive SOA Policy Governance solution, that minimizes the overhead associated with governance processes, and turns governance from a painful workload, into a productivity tool. Policy Manager supports enterprise and SOA architecture functions, ensuring consistent application of policies throughout an enterprise SOA program. Service Manager automatically implements and enforces policies from Policy Manager. It generates usage, performance and policy compliance metrics that it reports to Policy Manager to audit that policies are being enforced in a closed-loop process. Service Manager supports SOA and enterprise operational management functions, ensuring that services are secure, reliable, and meet individual performance goals for each consumer.

Policy Manager for IBM WebSphere DataPower provides centralized policy definition and service monitoring for DataPower appliances, and allows customers to easily use their existing DataPower deployments to virtualize enterprise services for high-availability, load-balancing, and offloading of costly XML and security processing.

SOA Software's deep integration with IBM WebSphere DataPower appliances provides customers with the ability to control the DataPower Appliance directly from the Policy Manager console, without the need to duplicate configuration manually. This provides customers with a 'one-click' management strategy leveraging DataPower as the runtime and the SOA Software's Policy Manager as the source of service and policy information as well as the reporting console for the monitoring data. SOA Software's Policy Manager is unique in its ability to manage the catalog of services, drive policy definition and distribution, and collect and display monitoring data for the DataPower devices, providing end-to-end policy enforcement and transaction monitoring. It allows customers to implement and enforce consistent, uniform policies throughout their infrastructure, and provides visibility into enterprise service usage, performance, and availability from network edge to application.

Policy Manager for IBM WebSphere DataPower can provide operational governance capabilities supporting SOA Software's Portfolio Manager and Repository Manager solutions for planning and development governance. This helps ensure the fidelity of governance models, processes and structures throughout the enterprise service lifecycle.

Click Here for the IBM DataPower Datasheet. For more information about SOA Software integration with IBM Products, see soa.com/ibm