Enterprise application integration can quickly take on nightmarish proportions: multiple applications requiring complex workflows, data that must change form from one app to another, and massive management snarls. Consequently, most EAI solutions are themselves fairly large and complicated.

The Bottom Line Cast Iron iA3000 v3.5 Cast Iron Systems, castironsys.com Good  7.5 criteria score weight Interoperability 8 30% Features 7 20% Management 7 15% Scalability 7 15% Setup 9 10% Value 7 10% Cost: Starts at $2,500 per month Platforms: Appliance is a long 1U rack-mount server (a Dell PowerEdge 1850) that runs its own Linux-based OS; Cast Iron Studio is a Java application that installs a private copy of J2RE 1.4.2 and is supported on Windows 2000/XP Bottom Line: CastIron iA3000 v3.5 is an EAI system and server packaged as an appliance. Installation is extremely simple. Developing orchestrations is primarily a visual configuration process. Options have deliberately been limited to make this a simple product to understand and use; that’s great unless you need more than it can deliver. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Cast Iron Systems attempts to simplify things by packaging all the production components of an EAI system in one preconfigured server. The Cast Iron iA3000 v3.5 integration appliance concentrates on providing reliable automatic application integration in short-running machine-to-machine scenarios.

[Screencast: See the Cast Iron iA3000 in action in our new screencast demo]

It’s certainly easy to install, and the graphical mapping and workflow design tools are a boon to companies with limited IT resources. But the appliance format has its downside when it comes to scalability, and the focus on simplicity removes some features enterprises may find useful.

Connecting end points
The iA3000 is a 1U Dell PowerEdge 1850 with two 2.8GHz dual-core HT-enabled processors, giving it eight CPU threads; 4GB of RAM; RAID disk arrays; and dual, hot-swap power supplies. It runs Cast Iron’s own EAI application on top of Linux. Installation is a matter of putting the server in a rack, connecting it to the network and a serial console, and plugging in both power supplies. Very easy.

There is a separate Java IDE, Cast Iron Studio, for configuring end points, schemas, orchestrations, and mappings graphically from a Windows workstation. The Appliance also hosts a graphical WMC (Web management console) server, a telnet server, and a serial console, each providing access to a command-line interface.

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Cast Iron’s tag line is “integrate in days,” and that might be true even for simple integration projects in the hands of trained and knowledgeable integrators. It took me just a couple of days to become familiar with the appliance and its development environment.

The iA3000 has four major functions: connecting to end points, transforming data, doing workflow, and managing the data flow. It does not attempt to provide a dashboard for business users, or a system for implementing long-running orchestrations with human approvals. Micrsoft’s BizTalk does these things, as do some of the other EAI products. CastIron chooses not to, stating that this functionality is for a relatively small market, which they are not trying to address because doing so would make their product more complicated.

Cast Iron Studio can create end points for a host of databases (with MySQL support planned for the next revision of the system), e-mail, FTP servers, Web servers, MQ, SAP, and Web services. Cast Iron supports a large number of line-of-business applications through Web service interfaces, database interfaces, XML file interfaces, or flat file interfaces. SAP’s BAPI/iDocs interface is a special case.

I was able to connect to a SQL Server 2005 database on my LAN using SQL Server authentication. Unfortunately, the iA3000 doesn’t seem to support Windows authentication and has no VPN client: I was unable to connect to SQL Servers behind firewalls that I normally reach using a Windows VPN. According to Cast Iron, people normally accomplish this by using a router to create a LAN-to-LAN VPN. Another option is to create a Web service that accesses the database, and to connect to the Web service from the Cast Iron appliance.

When I tried to import the WSDL for the GoogleSearch API to test Web service end points, Cast Iron Studio said that the WSDL was incorrect or unsupported but gave no details about what was wrong with it. According to the company, the iA3000 only supports the WS-I Basic Profile — GoogleSearch uses SOAP Encoded Arrays, which do not conform to WS-I Basic.

I was, however, able to import the WSDL for the StrikeIron USAddressVerification service, which conforms to the WS-I Basic profile, without any trouble. (Cast Iron supplied a working project to demonstrate the use of the StrikeIron service.) This orchestration creates an end point for HTTP posts on the appliance; the end point accepts a simple address, sends it to the StrikeIron service along with user credentials held in the orchestration as default values, receives a full verified address, and returns the full verified address to the caller.