Finding the answer to the age old question "Do you support that protocol?" has become unequivocally less complex. The answer now begins – and ends – with YES.
A new technology called Opaque Data Processing (ODP) being introduced in our next major release of CA Service Virtualization at CA World 2014 will eliminate the need for the typical Data Protocol Handler (DPH). Instead, it will match requests based on byte-level patterns and provide accurate responses based on your transaction library. The larger the library, the more accurate the response – the more data it has to learn from, the more precise it becomes.
This innovative idea and implementation was built through a three-way collaboration between CA Labs, Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and the CA Service Virtualization engineering and product teams. The teams set out to find a way to quickly handle new protocol support, without the need for engineering enhancements. But how does one learn a new protocol, without analyzing its standard operations and message structure?
The team dug deep into the messages and all the way to the byte level. Here is where patterns emerge. By using the Needleman-Wunsch genome sequencing alignment algorithm, ODP can discover byte-level patterns in messages and match those messages to ones it has already seen before.
Translating the data and understanding the protocol construct is no longer necessary. Matching with OPD is highly accurate on its own (up to 96%). To reach 100% accuracy the team added additional functionality to add weights to parts of messages that are more important (like the operation type).
This technology is essential to various industries that have their own proprietary binary protocols, copybook programs where the copybook is incomplete or no longer available, SCADA systems, text-based protocols and more.
Opaque Data Processing brings true artificial intelligence (AI) to service virtualization by automating the reasoning, planning, learning, communication and the ability to manipulate objects. It also lowers the knowledge barrier of users, eliminating the need for them to understand the full construct of a protocol, WADL or Copybook.
I’m sure you’ll want to hear more about this remarkable functionality soon. To get access to a pre-release version of CA Service Virtualization 8.0, please join our Customer Validation program. Alternatively, visit us at CA World 2014 in the ca Devcenter area where Chief Architect, Robert Williams and I will be presenting the details of Opaque Data Processing and show you how it works live on stage.
Thank you to the team of amazing engineers and researchers for their hard work and determination in coming up with this innovative way to address the ever-growing challenge of protocol support:
robertwilliams Chris_Kraus
