Service Manager Network Director

The Service Manager Network Director™ is the product component that implements policy enforcement and enablement for Web services.  The Management Point delivers comprehensive security services including: authentication, authorization, auditing, privacy and integrity.  It implements powerful Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring and dynamic load-balancing and reconfiguration capabilities to ensure that service levels are maintained at all times.  It also delivers rich transformation and routing functions to enable wide interoperability between services from various platforms and technologies.

It is available in 2 basic configurations for both Java and .NET:

• Agent – it can be installed within an app-server container to directly manage a local Web service.  This offers security advantages where the app-server is locally available
• Standalone – it is available as a single installable image for Wintel, UNIX and Linux systems for deployment as a software appliance.  It is a standalone server, and does not require or use an application server platform. This is particularly valuable for implementation in partner networks within supply chain management environments, or for Web service-enabling mainframe and legacy applications

Network Director Benefits

Central Policy-based Remote Management

It is managed centrally, leveraging the Service Manager™.  This ensures that global policy changes can be made quickly via the central policy manager and instantly implemented through the network of Management Points.

Reliable Delivery, Quality-of-Service, and Routing

Multi-protocol support and transparent protocol bridging - Ensures that all systems can be included in the Web services network leveraging multiple platforms, transport protocols and translations with path and protocol routing.

Delivers the flexibility required to realize the benefits of a service-oriented architecture with configurable rules based routing of content and messages.

Ensures compliance with multiple, contract-based end-user SLAs using powerful quality-of-service based routing algorithms.

Supports synchronous and asynchronous invocation of Web services and SOAP with attachments.

Security Enforcement

Delivers powerful policy-based authentication, authorization, and signature verification and generation.  Implements a comprehensive array of authentication mechanisms including basic, X.509 and SAML.

Maximizes existing investment in security infrastructure through tight integration with 3rd party security platforms including Netegrity SiteMinder and TransactionMinder, and IBM Tivoli Access Manager.

Version Management and Transformation

Delivers application agility by ensuring that consumers are abstracted from changes at the provider endpoint through upgrade and downgrade of XML and SOAP messages according to WSDL version changes.

Ensures broad service interoperability, and delivers data validation and data enrichment by allowing transformation of any aspect of the data payload of XML and SOAP messages.

Ensures rapid deployment and acceptance while reducing cost with enhanced wizard based message transformation and service configuration.

Performance

Ensures that the entire Web services fabric meets stringent enterprise performance and reliability demands, leveraging caching for both payloads and security credentials.

For more information, and detailed features click here.