SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (PI 7.1) as an Enterprise Service Bus
By Elena Doll, SAP NetWeaver Product Management - SOA Middleware
SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 (PI 7.1) is at the center of your SOA landscape and integrates all the different systems like SAP, Non-SAP and Legacy systems. As heart of the integration landscape, the entire communication between these systems goes through the central integration platform that is through PI.
In the previous releases of PI, it acted as the single point of failure and disrupted the communication between the systems in case of a breakdown of the integration server. That is why the latest release of PI that is SAP NetWeaver PI 7.1 includes an Advanced Adapter Engine (AAE), which has a decentralized architecture. The AAE has several Java based adapter engines, which can be used in a cluster and load balanced. These adapter engines act as mini PI's and helps in the communication between the systems. They process, map and route messages just like the central PI server itself. PI with decentralized AAE acts as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
This decentralized architecture makes the communication more reliable and improves the availability of the PI platform. Moreover, with this decentralized architecture, more and more messages can be processed in the same amount of time. This leads to an increased throughput and a reduction of latency time significantly often up to the factor 10.
