Microsoft BizTalk Server is a publish and subscribe architecture that uses adapters to receive and send messages, implements business processes through orchestration, and includes management and tracking of these different parts. BizTalk Server also includes trading partner management for business-to-business messaging, high availability to maximize uptime, a development platform to create your own components, an administration console to manage your artifacts, and business activity monitoring to manage aggregations, alerts, and profiles.
BizTalk allows Enterprises to implement Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration architectural patterns which support the building of rich business processes on top of an organization’s connected systems in a loosely-coupled way.
CORTX is a distributed object storage system designed for great efficiency, massive capacity, and high HDD-utilization. CORTX is 100% Open Source.
The CORTX BizTalk Adapter is a piece of software adhering to the official BizTalk adapter specifications that allow it to be plugged directly into the BizTalk Administration Console enabling the BizTalk messaging engine to read/write from/to a CORTX instance. The adapter enables CORTX to “light up” within the Enterprise by allow rich business processes to move, store and activate data within CORTX without themselves having to be tightly coupled to CORTX. Instead of integrating CORTX tightly to each application, system or business process of interest, the CORTX BizTalk Adapter allows all interested applications systems and business processes to seamlessly use CORTX as a mass capacity on-prem object store “Enterprise Service” through BizTalk.
This video presents the case for the CORTX BizTalk Adapter and why it is an important and natural fit for sophisticated Enterprise integration architectures.
I used the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line-Of-Business (LOB) Software Development Kit (SDK) and its tooling for Microsoft’s Visual Studio to generate the .NET code empty template for the WCF-LOB Adapter. I then used the Amazon AWS .NET SDK as the S3 client library to implement the CORTX integration code within the generated adapter template. The resultant adapter was automatically compatible with BizTalk Server, since BizTalk is itself built for and with Microsoft’s premier .NET development platform used around the world by millions of developers, and has integral support for WCF.
If you don’t have a BizTalk environment available you will need to create one. The two guides in this section will help you set one up on a Windows Computer.
First, BizTalk is a “store-and-forward” messaging engine and relies on Microsoft SQL Server to persist all messages published to it, so that it can offer Enterprise-scale High Availability (HA). BizTalk never loses a message!
If you don’t have a Microsoft SQL Server environment step up, I have prepared this guide to walk you through the process.
Once you have SQL Server installed, you are reading to install and configure Microsoft BizTalk Server itself. I have prepared this guide to show you how.
Finally, I have prepared this guide to walk you through how to install the CORTX BizTalk Adapter. It is made easy with a Windows Installer package for the adapter I provide that you can find here.
If you need instructions on how to set up your own CORTX system you can find instructions on how to setup one on a local machine here or AWS here.
The CORTX BizTalk Adapter is easy for anyone familiar with BizTalk to use. Here are some resources to help you get started with the adapter and help you imagine the many ways it can be used to seamlessly bring hyper-scale on premise object storage to the Enterprise.
I have prepared this Getting Started Tutorial to walk you through how to use the CORTX BizTalk Adapter to send data from BizTalk to CORTX, as well as receive data from CORTX into BizTalk.
You can also watch this video to watch me perform similar steps in the tutorial in a live demo.
In this video I walk you through how you could use the CORTX BizTalk Adapter to migrate massive amounts of data from Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage server into CORTX in a live demo.
In this video I walk you through how you could use the CORTX BizTalk Adapter to seamlessly add critical unstructured data archival capabilities into any Enterprise business process, to meet continuously expanding data retention and regulatory compliance requirements. This live demo will show how easy it is to add a final CORTX archival step to an existing business process that processes incoming Purchase Orders for sending to an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
In this video I walk you through how you could use the CORTX BizTalk Adapter to activate big data analytics within the Enterprise from data sourced from CORTX. This live demo will simulate an Internet of Things (IoT) scenario where an IoT device writes telemetry data directly to CORTX once a second, and BizTalk reads the data as it arrives and sends it to a custom data analytics Web API/Site for real-time visualization.