WXS In A Box?

The Zealot is out in Vegas for the annual IMPACT conference. One of the more interesting product announcements (other than WXS 7.1) is the DataPower XC10. It appears to be a product of the eXtreme Scale product dev team (thanks Joe Lea!).

Short version: the XC10 provides a pure-play implementation of WXS technology with 160 GB of storage. Reading between the lines, WXS disk offload clearly works, and this device will handle DynaCache, session cache, and "web cache" (including Hibernate near-line) for your web app server environment.

I'm impressed. Outlying questions:

1) Is this thing as hardened as the XA35-XM70 appliances? They do very different things, and WXS has always been Java-based. That's a far cry from a pure ASIC-implementation of XML acceleration.

2) Speaking of Java, does this thing use a near-realtime JVM? Deterministic performance (meaning predictable) is very much key for caching at the high end.

3) How competitive is the XC10 versus Azul's bad-boy Java appliances?

More to come.