SonicMQ Finds Right Balance

The Bedford, Mass.-based vendor recently released SonicMQ 6.0, high-volume, fault-tolerant middleware software that can be installed on off-the-shelf hardware. Suitable for mission-critical applications, the software costs $15,000 per CPU pair.

"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 Denver-based national consulting firm. "It's lowering the cost ofintegration 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 various fault-tolerant, load-balancing and replication features not typically found in such middleware, including stateful replication between a pair of servers or across a messaging cluster. Because the message replication occurs in realtime, failovers usually occur in 10 to 15 seconds, compared with 10 to 15 minutes for 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 Sonic. "Now you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands [of dollars] on clustering software. [With] our fault-tolerant message brokers, you can buy two standard Intel machines, stick Linux on them and have fault tolerance on them in minutes."

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, according to Sonic.

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