Beyond the inherent improvments of an ESB over traditional EAI solutions, Petals ESB uses a best-of-breed approach and open source development model to distinguish from other ESB solutions, bringing essential features. Together with other Petals software, it provides a company everything necessary to build your project, from a traditional integration platform to a service oriented architecture.

h3. Natively Distributed Architecture

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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]
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h3. Light & Powerful

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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).

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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.

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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.

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