IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances is a family of pre-built, pre-configured rack-mountable network devices (XML appliances) designed to accelerate XML and Web Services deployments while extending SOA infrastructure.
Originally these devices were created by DataPower Technology Inc., which was acquired by IBM in October 2005.
The appliances are designed to be scalable, with options for high availability and clustering for increased performance and reliability.
Users cannot run third-party applications on DataPower as they would need a traditional server and operating system.
Instead of a traditional filesystem, it runs with a collection of isolated virtual file systems called 'Application Domains'.