Performance: SAP XI vs BizTalk

Question

I need links to performance benchmarks of SAP XI and BizTalk. They should be compared by processing messages.
thanks in advance...

Answer 1

Hi ,
in my company we had more or less the same situation 2 years back, a existing BizTalk solution, and whether we should introduce XI or not.
We concluded with the following; BizTalk should be used as the main integration engine between the different system landscapes and ALL external communication, and XI should be used as the integration engine for all data to/from our SAP system landscape. Depending on the integration scenario, we may use both.
BizTalk will not see any SAP systems, only web services exposed by XI or using IBM MQ depending on an async/sync integration scenario.
We believe that XI is better with integration from/to SAP, and;
- In future SAP will deliver out of box integration for the XI system (XI content) for Enterprise Services Architecture
- Several components in the NetWeaver stack are using XI for communication
We have a SAP system landscape with several 46C systems (IS/OIL, HR ...) and newer NetWeaver solutions.
I can give you a brief resume of our experiences – my background is ABAP developer since ’98, I have implemented a few BizTalk solutions to SAP 46C, and I’m a certified XI developer and developed several XI solutions between SAP 46C/640 and BizTalk.
BizTalk ******
Overall communication between SAP systems and BizTalk depending on the integration scenario and who is the initiator:
SAP 46C to BizTalk:
There are no good mechanisms available for sending data from 46C to BizTalk, we are using HTTP_POST with XML payload. Then you must use the iXML library on the SAP side, its ok, but you will spend, in my point of view, too many hours on XML programming that can be generated automatically.
BizTalk to SAP 46C - Which SAP adapter to use for BizTalk?
We started with SAP adapter from IWay, but that adapter gave us a lot of problems on the BizTalk server (pretty complex adapter with strange behaviour, and several integration scenarios stopped working for no reason at all (unstable)).
Due to several severe problems, we switched to SAP adapter from Microsoft 1 year back in time. If I don’t remember wrong, back then, the SAP adapter from Microsoft did not support parameter of type string or table types – so there are/were some limitations regarding the signature of the RFC function.
The SAP adapter from Microsoft is more stable than the previous, BUT we have some hick ups with that one as well when BizTalk does very frequent calls to SAP 46C.
SAP 640 to/from BizTalk:
I assume you can use the web service functionality on the SAP side in order to send/receive data, but I don’t know whether 640 support asynchronous web service.
XI *****
The communication mechanism between different SAP systems and XI are much better than with BizTalk:
SAP 46C to XI:
Configure a sender communication channel with RFC adapter; basically the XI system will be RFC server so the only thing you have to do is to create a RFC port on the 46C system “pointing” to the XI system. In the Abap program, you can do normal function calls with destination (RFC port) AND the RFC call will automatically be translated to XML on the XI side.
Thus, you can forget all about the iXML library and XML rendering of the payload to HTTP.
Besides, you can choose to use sRFC, tRFC or even qRFC depending on the integration scenario and whether you want guaranteed delivery.
XI to SAP 46C:
More or less same as BizTalk using a SAP adapter, but string and table types are supported.
SAP 640 to/from XI:
This is a very nice situation, every 640 has a local integration engine, so the main integration engine (XI) can send/receive XML messages both async/sync. Another advantage is using the SPROXY transaction on the 640 system, generating automatically a proxy class being able to send/receive messages based on a message interface defined in XI (outside-in programming).
Finally *****
BizTalk and XI are at a conceptual level identical, two integration engines with the purpose of send/receive, route and do message transformation (mapping) using adapters to different technical systems.
Microsoft has a lot of resources available and for sure, BizTalk will be a very good choice for most companies.
SAP came late with XI, but they are not trying to make the best integration engine, but good enough. And for sure, I think SAP will come with very nice XI content in time (interface mappings between message interfaces – business solutions) which is beyond BizTalk.
As an ABAP programmer I just love the transport system between development, quality and production systems. We are using the CMS transport systems between our development XI, quality XI and production XI – it is so nice and fast. With BizTalk you have to create a MSI file (installation file – which files to include…) and somehow transport the file (mail or whatever) to the quality environment for installation – really tedious work compared to XI.
So we are using BizTalk 2004 and XI 3.0 and are very happy with both.
Best regards
Torstein
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kish
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