Reactivity Inc. this week juggled its Web services lineup, adding a stand-alone management component and a silicon-based acceleration engine. The additions will create a product suite designed to help companies secure, manage and boost performance of Web services deployments.
The hardware and software was unveiled as the Reactivity Secure Deployment System, a suite of four products that secure and manage corporate Web services.
Reactivity has been refining its collection of appliances and software over the past two years as it battles with competitors such as DataPower Technology Inc., Sarvega Inc., Forum Systems Inc. and Westbridge Technology Inc.
The company unveiled the renamed Reactivity Gateway appliance, which was formerly called XML Firewall, and Version 4.0 of its XML Operating System, which includes a slew of performance enhancements.
Reactivity also has spun off its management console from the firewall and into a separate stand-alone appliance called the Reactivity Manager. The Manager provides policy services, a workflow engine and monitoring capabilities.
Separation of the gateway and the management console lets users hide security policies they use to govern the action of Web services.
“We don’t want our security policies to reside in the (demilitarized zone),” says Spyros Kattou, e-business IT architect for Aeroplan in Montreal, a division of Air Canada that manages the redemption of flyer miles for the airline’s customers.
“This suite provides us the flexibility to separate the gateway from the management of security policies.” Aeroplan’s Web site lets users redeem miles not only for flights but also for hotels, car rentals and merchandise.
The Reactivity Manager supports policy creation, diagnostic and monitoring capabilities. It also supports policy migration, rollback, logging and delegated management, which lets companies assign the management of certain policies to specific groups of administrators.
Reactivity offers two versions of the Gateway — the 2450 and 2460 — with the latter featuring Tarari Inc.’s silicon-based XML content-processing engine. The Tarari engine processes XML messages used in Web services applications at speeds up to 1G bit/sec. Both versions of the gateway include the nCipher nForce 1600 cryptographic and Secure Sockets Layer acceleration engine.
The Secure Deployment System includes the Gateway-D, a desktop appliance that delivers an XML firewall test environment for developers, and the Gatekeeper, a free software plug-in for application or Web servers that prevents unauthorized access to Web services from within the internal corporate network. The Gatekeeper ensures that the Reactivity Gateway issues a valid security assertion, based on Security Assertion Markup Language, and includes a digital signature on every message based on Simple Object Access Protocol.
Pricing for the Gateway starts at US$65,000. The Manager is priced at US$50,000 and the Gateway-D is US$5,000.
