Cast Iron Studio:

Cast Iron Studio (Studio) is at the heart of the easy-to-use design experience offered by the Integration Appliances. Studio provides a graphical environment for you to design integration data flows called orchestrations. Studio allows you to create these orchestrations by dragging and dropping activities into a design window. Once designed, these workflows can be published to the Appliance with a single click. Studio can be used to design both simple point-to-point orchestrations as well as more complex orchestrations that involve multiple endpoints. Studio allows you to create these orchestrations using a "configuration, not coding" approach that enables even business users to complete integration projects.

Connectivity

Studio is also used to configure connectivity to application or endpoints of your integration project. Studio's intuitive user interface makes connecting to even the most complex enterprise applications a breeze.

Transformation

When you integrate two or more systems, you must resolve the differences in data formats used by the systems involved in the integration. Studio provides an intuitive visual data mapping tool that allows you to create maps in minutes using simple drag and drop operations.

Workflow

Studio allows you to create data flows or business logic to be applied during runtime. These define decision points where you can configure data rules that allow the Integration Appliance to intelligently move data from one application to the other, while performing completeness and error checks. By using a "configuration, not coding" approach, Studio enables even business users to define the rules for integration projects.

Flat-file Data Formats

The Cast Iron Integration Appliance provides powerful capabilities to process structured data, such as flat-files, SAP IDOCs, or EDI documents. Using Studio, you graphically define the structure of the data (including optional, required, or repeating fields) and determine if data is delimited or a positional structure.

Point-and-click Deployment

Publishing your completed Studio project to the Cast Iron Integration Appliance is a simple point-and-click operation. You can easily publish the same project to multiple appliances to achieve scalability and load-balancing for your integration projects.

Run-time Appliance

Combining ease-of-use with robust functionality, the purpose-built run-time Appliance brings high performance and reliability to your integration solution. With easy scalability and complete security, the appliance is self-contained and has everything needed to complete your integrations.

Security

The appliance and its related components provide a comprehensive security solution for data integration. You can securely administer the Appliance using SSH or HTTPS via the dedicated management port or via the serial console. The Run-time Appliance provides a configurable, role-based access control mechanism that allows fine-grained control over all administrative functions. The Run-time Appliance also has an embedded PKI implementation that allows full administration of x.509 certificates and SSL administration for both appliance management and data communication.

Transactional Data Integrity

The Run-time Appliance guarantees integrity of your transactions by providing guaranteed delivery of data to and from endpoints, and by persisting data at workflow check-points. The Appliance can provide exactly once, at most once, or at least once message delivery semantics depending on the capabilities of the application endpoint. With both guaranteed delivery and workflow check-pointing the Appliance guarantees that your data will not be lost or go unprocessed due to the failure of an endpoint system, your network, or the appliance itself.

Reliability, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery

Reliability is inherent with the Run-time Appliance. Dual power supplies, redundant hot-swappable hard disk drives, and redundant cooling fans minimize appliance downtime. If you require even higher levels of availability for your mission-critical integrations, the High-Availability (HA) solution is available. The HA solution is deployed as a pair of Appliances that provides a hot-standby capability. When the primary Integration Appliance in a HA pair fails for any reason, the standby unit assumes operation automatically and immediately without operator intervention. The HA Appliance pair solution provides complete transactional and network failover, guaranteeing full transactional data integrity and preserving guaranteed delivery semantics of your mission-critical data.

Performance Scalability

The Run-time Appliance is a fully integrated hardware/software solution that imposes no limit to the number of appliances you can add to your network. The tight coupling of hardware and software enables integration optimizations that cannot be achieved with traditional software solutions. To ensure flexibility of installation in any environment, the Appliance uses standard yet configurable port assignments for all data and management communication and supports DHCP.

Web Management Console

Web Management Console (WMC) is a simple-to-use environment where you deploy integration projects and then securely monitor and manage these integrations. The Web Management Console also manages all deployment assets related to the integration for you. These assets could include the WSDL definition for a web service to invoke your integration or database scripts to send database events to the Run-time Appliance.

Deploying Projects

For each project created in Studio, you can create one or more deployment configurations. Each configuration represents a unique sandbox that can be independently administered. Each configuration gives independent control over the security permissions and allows you to customize the configuration for different deployment environments. Examples of different deployment environments include separate development, staging and production environments that have different database names, user names, passwords, or other deployment-specific configuration properties.

Monitoring

The Cast Iron Integration Appliance continually monitors its own health and the health of your integration projects through the WMC. If the appliance detects a fault, the system will send you a notification using an SNMP or email notification. In addition, you can query the status of the system at anytime via SNMP or the Web Management Console.

The Cast Iron Integration Appliance maintains detailed monitoring data for each deployed project providing a count of workflows that have run, the number and types of errors encountered, and a detailed step-by-step account of each integration operation. The WMC makes it easy for you to find the data you need quickly through sophisticated filtering and search capabilities. You can also use the built-in search capability to find the status information you need using the data you know, such as a customer name or purchase order number.

Analyze Your Data

WMC allows you to generate reports about transaction history. You can archive this history for auditing or other business purposes. You can also track message processing status for each activity in connector and workflow jobs. Status includes rich context for both successful outcomes and errors, enabling analysis of trends and exceptions. You can use the WMC to sort, filter, and archive these logs, or you can export them to third-party tools for offline analysis. You can also export error logs and status reports to a version control tool for project management purposes.

Error Logging

The Integration Appliance logs the movement of data through each step of an integration project. With the WMC, you can view the status of a message as it progresses through a workflow. If an error occurs, this level of granularity enables you to quickly identify the fault and drill down into the error. If the Integration Appliance loses a connection to an endpoint or receives invalid data from an endpoint, it flags an error and issues an email or SNMP alert based on the policies created in the WMC. These policies determine the person or persons that are notified on specific errors.

Managing

The Cast Iron Integration Appliance has been designed from the ground-up to provide 100% remote management capabilities. You can administer the Integration Appliance remotely over HTTP(S) using the WMC (or by telnet/ssh using the Command Line Interface). Whether you are setting up the Integration Appliance for the first time, installing software updates, or setting up security and notification policies, everything needed to manage a secure network appliance is available remotely through the WMC.

For your Operations staff, the Cast Iron Integration Appliance provides the capability to schedule downtime for your integration projects during standard maintenance windows, simplifies field serviceability with hot-swappable parts for all critical components, and provides a unique Cast Iron Integration Appliance identity smart card that maintains complete network identity even if an entire unit is replaced.

The High-Availability (HA) Pair of Integration Appliances leverages the sophisticated monitoring capability to provide completely automated, fully transactional, failover across two Integration Appliances if a serious system fault is detected. The paired-solution provides unprecedented levels of availability for your mission- critical integration needs.

High-Availability

The High-Availability (HA) Pair of Integration Appliances leverages the sophisticated monitoring capability to provide completely automated, fully transactional, failover across two Integration Appliances if a serious system fault is detected. The paired-solution provides unprecedented levels of availability for your mission-critical integration needs.