Sonic Software Adds Fault Tolerance To Messaging Middleware

"The new version pushes the envelope in how it implements fast, high-availability messaging on a small hardware footprint, even as it eliminates additional points of failure," said Steve Field, vice president of enterprise integration solutions at Tier1 Innovation, a national consulting firm based in Denver. "It's lowering the cost of integration by reducing the effort to build high availability."

Competing against products such as Tibco Rendezvous and IBM Software's MQseries, Sonic's updated messaging software adds a variety of fault-tolerant, load-balancing and replication features not typically found in this sort of middleware. These include stateful replication between a pair of servers or across a messaging cluster. Because this message replication occurs in realtime, failovers typically occur in 10 to 15 seconds, compared with 10 to 15 minutes often experienced with hardware-based fault-tolerant systems.

"Because they can't rely on the middleware, many in-house developers at Wall Street firms and telecommunications companies spend 30 percent of their time building recovery and problem-avoidance techniques and backing it up with hardware clusters," said Paul Moxon, senior director of product management at Bedford, Mass.-based Sonic.

"Now you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands on clustering software. Our fault-tolerant message brokers allows you to buy two standard Intel machines, stick Linux on them and have fault tolerance in minutes. At $15,000 per CPU pair, it makes fault tolerance available to the rest of us," he said.

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According to the company, SonicMQ creates a "hot-hot" configuration of message broker pairs. In this way, one server with a secondary broker can be configured with another primary broker--improving each machine's usage and performance, while balancing loads within the cluster.

"Load balancing is always important for high-volume applications," said Field. "I believe this combination of high availability and load balancing is unique. Replicating it would be more expensive with other options."

SonicMQ serves as the underpinning of Sonic's integration software, Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus). Moxon said all of the capabilities added to the company's messaging software will appear in the next version of Sonic ESB, slated for release next month.