DataPower's XS40 XML Security Gateway 3.0 1U appliance gets excellent overall marks, especially for an easily managed user interface based on task-centered features; excellent, speedy performance; and easy policy configuration with an XPath editor. Navigation could be more user-friendly, and the drag-and-drop policy builder is confusing to use. During testing, the XS40 XML Security Gateway 3.0 1U appliance speeded eXtensible Markup Language (XML) processing and streamlined the building and management of XML- and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) security policies. Dual 10/100/1000 interfaces are provided for traffic processing along with one 10/100/1000 interface for out-of-band management. The XS40 performs as a proxy between a client and internal SOAP endpoints. The very useful XPath editor allowed testers to easily build a routing table by selecting the node in the XPath editor, and DataPower automatically gnat ed the correct XPath expressions. A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) tool permitted testers to import WSDL for the services to be secured, and users were guided through steps to create a policy, including authentication of specific operations, decryption, and signature verification. Performance for SOAP cleanup was at 1,103 request/response pairs/second on ingress and egress traffic in one described test, and at 559 per second on a described second test.