SonicMQ is a standards-based enterprise messaging system, designed to deliver high service availability, high performance, high-end management capabilities and scalability. The message server software acts as transactional middleware and now comes with fault tolerance for 'continuous availability'. Rather than relying on clustering or RAID, SonicMQ 6.0 uses 'stateful replication' between servers in a cluster, which ensures availability, overcoming failures that have plagued messaging environments, according to Sonic Software. The company also claims the software is easier to configure than its previous messaging systems. Sonic Software later hopes to tighten links between SonicMQ and Microsoft's .NET environment, perhaps adding support for handheld devices.

Pros: Fault tolerance; cross-platform support; standards based
Cons: Doesn't support Windows 98 or earlier (including NT)


Release: Sonic Software, the inventor of the enterprise service bus (ESB), has released SonicMQ 6.0, the first continuously available enterprise messaging system. Leveraging the patent-pending Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture (CAA), SonicMQ 6.0 dramatically reduces the time required for an enterprise messaging system to resume operations after hardware, software or network failures, effectively eliminating costly transaction rollbacks.

Minutes of system downtime can translate into millions of pounds in lost revenue and lost productivity, especially for high-volume systems such as those found in the financial services and telecommunications industries. SonicMQ provides the most advanced fault tolerant messaging architecture, reducing failover time from minutes to seconds. Most fault tolerant architectures rely entirely on custom coded solutions and expensive hardware-based mechanisms to ensure failover. SonicMQ 6.0 provides a software-based solution out-of-the-box that uses stateful replication between a pair of servers, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware, specialised fault sensing software, and mirrored/redundant disks. SonicMQ 6.0 also significantly eases administrative load, resulting in a significantly simpler and more cost -effective approach to enterprise messaging availability.

'This release significantly raised the standard for enterprise messaging, eliminating shortfalls that have typically plagued messaging environments. With the Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture we're the first to deliver stateful replication between servers in a messaging cluster, reducing failover time to seconds rather than minutes,' said Bill Cullen, vice president of products at Sonic Software. 'Because it is so easy to use and so much less costly than hardware-based solutions, SonicMQ makes continuous availability feasible for a much broader set of applications and customers.'

SonicMQ 6.0 eliminates many of the past obstacles to achieving continuous availability in the messaging infrastructure. Hot Failover: SonicMQ 6.0 uses stateful replication to provide seamless failover in seven to 15 seconds - rather than seven to 15 minutes - that is transparent to the receiving client or application. In-process transactions - no matter how complex - continue to their destinations without any costly roll back or recovery. Most fault tolerant messaging solutions rely on system replication and replicated activation to achieve fault tolerance. When a failure occurs, the recovery process frequently needs to roll back transactions - a time-consuming and expensive operation.

Improved Messaging Quality of Service (QoS): SonicMQ's real-time message replication ensures that messages are never trapped, duplicated or received out-of-order. Most messaging products can leave trapped messages, create duplicate messages or cause messages to be received out-of-order across a failover.

First Fully Software-based Fault Tolerant Messaging: SonicMQ provides 'out-of-the-box' software-based configuration of primary and secondary pairs that does not require specialised hardware. Further, 'hot-hot' fault tolerant clusters maximise server utilisation and messaging throughput. Typical fault tolerant messaging products require expensive, complex hardware configurations that can tie up corporate resources with redundant servers that sit idle.

Ease of Deployment: SonicMQ 6.0 can be configured for continuous availability in minutes. SonicMQ reduces the administrative headaches for organisations already using fault tolerance, while making fault tolerance possible for many applications and locations where it wasn't justified in the past. The high cost and complexity of configuring and managing hardware-based fault tolerant messaging architectures lengthens deployment times, or can rule out the use of fault tolerance altogether.

Links:
SonicMQ 6.0 Web site
SonicMQ 6.0 30-day trial

BIOS, Apr 19, 04 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Server