Most of EAI and ESB solutions are based on a centralized architecture. This choice brings simplicity of configuration and maintenance. One risk however is the great loss the company would sustain in case of serious problem with the middleware.
Choosing a middleware clusters reduce this risk but adds great complexity to the infrastructure.
Petals ESB chose the third way, using a P2P-like approach: the container can be installed on several machines, each one hosting its set of services, router and shared registry of services.
- high availability, thus SLA respect, thanks to replication of services on several nodes and intelligent routing;
- inherent load balancing.
[Learn more on architecture models|http://www.petalslink.com/en/technologies/what-is-a-highly-distributed-architecture]

h3. Light & Powerful

Petals ESB is entirely modular, making it a light platform, running without application server. Numerous components are already available for data exchange (FTP, SOAP, REST, POP...) and data manipulation (POJO, Quartz, XSLT, Talend...)
h2 Monitoring and Orchestration capabilities
By combining Petals BPEL/SCA service engines and our dedicated IDE, Petals Studio, you can easily assemble individual services to form business processes, with GUI and code validation.
Using notifications service engine, Petals View allows easy monitoring configuration, so that end business users can watch their business processes and analyse their efficiency.

h3. Standard and Open Source

Petals ESB is one of the few to be fully compliant with the Java Business Integration specification. It makes full use of standards protocols.
As an open source product, you can freely adapt it to fit your need, be it through a new component or container adaptation, or ask any expert to do it for you, without being bound to Petals Link (although we are probably the finest experts on these matters hehe).

h3. Ease of Configuration

Setting up services, orchestrating them, creating data transformation jobs, can prove a hassle from middle-sized projects on. [Petals Studio|petalsstudio:] greatly facilitates these steps, by providing numerous service creation wizards, import/export tools, a graphical interface to create services orchestrations.

h3. Ease of Administration
Petals ESB is bundled with a [Web Console|webconsole:], web-GUI to easily watch and administer the ESB: deployement of new services units and assemblies, components management, fine-grained technical monitoring, testing facilities.

h3. Business-oriented monitoring

While previous items appealed more to developers and system administrators, Petals View is aimed more at non-technical users. Once Petals View has been set up and connected by the former, end-users can further configure fine-grained, detailed business reports on any message exchange going through Petals ESB. With this, they can easily follow their business procedures, identify any problem and use this data to build process efficiency analyses.

h3. Business-oriented services management

In contrast with the webconsole, which allows technical deployment and management of services, Petals Master provides a graphical way to manage services from a business point of view. Associate services to roles, users and company to build a structured business-oriented view of all your services, document them with attached documents. All of this allows better business management, processes improvement and optimal reuse of services. Thus ensuring a proper evolution of your infrastructure.