Layer 7 Technologies, a leading provider of XML security and networking for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0, today announced its SecureSpan™ XML Firewall is now available as a virtual soft-appliance. The first of its kind, this soft-appliance for SOA enables enterprises and services providers to rapidly deploy a SOA security appliance on commodity server hardware and VMWare virtualized computing platforms, reducing time to deployment and implementation costs while improving architectural flexibility.

The virtual soft-appliance features the same properties as Layer 7’s SecureSpan XML Firewall hardware appliance and provides advanced Web services identity and message level security to address the broadest range of SOA integration, portal and B2B security challenges. The solution enables end users to implement identical XML Firewall hardware appliance functionality on any server infrastructure running VMWare Player, VMWare Server or VMWare ESX through a simple download and installation.

"An increasing number of enterprises are exploring virtualization strategies for maximizing their hardware investment," said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at ZapThink. "Layer 7’s soft-appliance provides those organizations a production-ready SOA security and networking solution that can scale on demand to meet changing transaction loads."

Key benefits of the Layer 7 virtual appliance include:

- Real-time download and deployment

- Support for multi-tenant data center environments

- Full clustering for simplified load scaling

- Utility computing over shared server, CPU and memory resources

- Broad operating system (OS) support

- Interoperability with Layer 7’s SecureSpan hardware appliances

"By introducing the SecureSpan XML Firewall soft-appliance we are giving enterprises and service providers unmatched choice in where and how they implement their SOA architectures,” said Dimitri Sirota, VP of Marketing, Layer 7 Technologies. “Layer 7 is the first SOA security and networking vendor to offer advanced XML firewall functionality through a purpose built hardware-accelerated physical appliance or a software instantiated virtual appliance. This allows our customers to decide which platform best suits their needs.”

The Layer 7 XML Firewall soft-appliance is now available for a free 15-day trial at www.layer7tech.com/softappliance. For more information please contact Layer 7 Technologies at www.layer7tech.com or at +1.800.681.9377.