This transition, which resulted in the replacement of the TIBCO SmartSockets product, enables NYMEX to support massive volumes of orders, price prints and trades including up to 1.2 million contracts per day, a 38% increase in volume, and process more than 50,000 messages per second, a tenfold increase over the former implementation.

In addition to increased scalability and messaging throughput, the SonicMQ advanced distributed management and deployment infrastructure will enable NYMEX to replace previously disparate messaging solutions with one enterprise messaging system, reducing ongoing management costs.

Prior to working with the SonicMQ product, NYMEX used a "hub-and-spoke" solution for point-to-point messaging that lacked horizontal scalability and warm fail-over capabilities. In unifying its messaging under SonicMQ, NYMEX has increased fault tolerance, scalability and flow control.

"We realised that the emergence of electronic trading side-by-side with floor trading, coupled with our upcoming launch of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, meant that our current messaging system would not be enough to support our needs in the near and long term future," said Mark Francetic, vice president of software development at NYMEX. "With the SonicMQ distributed enterprise messaging platform, we can be sure not only that our messaging system will scale horizontally to meet the growing scope and volume of data, but that the platform will be continuously available."

Other benefits that the SonicMQ distributed enterprise messaging platform will deliver to NYMEX include:

• JMS as a standard API: This creates a future-proofed, heterogeneous environment, allowing the SonicMQ platform to integrate seamlessly with NYMEX's legacy systems. The TIBCO-based messaging system used a proprietary API that added unnecessary layers of complexity to integration.
• Flow Control: This enables downstream applications to catch up to spikes in messaging volume. The previous prododuct could become overwhelmed by backed up messages and create unstable nodes which could lead to message loss and system 'downtime,' unacceptable for an organisation with a 'five nines' availability goal.
• Federated Security and Access Control: This allows NYMEX to leverage existing network investments and ensures secure transmission of messages both inside and outside the firewall.
• Clustering and Dynamic Routing: Clustering allows NYMEX to scale to support a large volume of messages, while dynamic routing optimises the use of network resources to ensure the best flow of traffic, enabling NYMEX to optimise the traffic between brokers and extend the message bus geographically as in the case of the Dubai Exchange.
• Heterogeneous Application Support: This lowers the total cost of ownership and time to market by enabling applications written in various languages, including Java, .NET and C++, to communicate across a single messaging platform.

"NYMEX's experience typifies the challenges faced by organisations with high messaging volume growth," said Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure Division, Progress Software. "Modernisation and fast growth of its trading practices outstripped their existing messaging environment. Only the SonicMQ platform could meet the critical requirement for extremely low latency message delivery at throughputs of more than 50,000 messages per second—all with zero message loss and 'five-nines' availability. We have worked closely with NYMEX over the past several months to ensure that the standards-based, reliable enterprise messaging of the SonicMQ platform supports their demanding business needs."