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XML is becoming the lingua franca for Web services. However, XML's flexibility places significant demands on network infrastructure, consuming as much as 80% of server processing power to perform CPU-intensive tasks such as transformation, compression and XML Web services security.
XML acceleration is emerging as a critical technology to offload XML processing from applications, especially in the form of hardware-based appliances. Along with processing XML data, XML acceleration helps implement secure data exchange and delivers quality of service (QoS).
An acceleration appliance typically consists of an off-the-shelf motherboard and an off-the-shelf operating system. The appliances perform operations such as parsing, validating, transforming and compressing XML faster than application servers because they are tuned for specific tasks and can use the operating system and hardware far more efficiently.
The appliances generally are deployed in a three-tier architecture in a data center. They typically sit behind firewalls, between load balancers and application servers or a...