This radical new offering from a recognized messaging industry leader shatters a previously insurmountable messaging latency problem by taking an approach that lowers latency, improves predictability, and provides increased throughput by implementing TIBCO messaging in hardware.

"Messaging is the backbone of communications between IT systems. Whether used as a way to integrate applications or to disseminate data across systems in real time, message volumes are exploding," according to Maureen Fleming, program director, business process management and middleware at IDC. "Messaging appliances promise to improve both the cost-performance ratio and manageability of messaging and are an important next step in the evolution of this mission critical technology."

Extending TIBCO's 25-year history of continuous innovation, TIBCO Messaging Appliance(TM) P-7500 delivers a number of key metrics that will change the game for customers:

• 10X increase in messaging volume of current software-only solutions
• 50% reduction in base latency
• 10X increase in the predictability of data flows and performance

"Even in a period of turmoil in financial markets, the one constant is a steady increase in trading volume," said Tom Laffey, executive vice president, products and technology at TIBCO. "As a result, data-intensive industries -- financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, government and major online commerce companies -- need lower latency and increased throughput at lower costs."

Messaging is Growing Fast and Furious

Mainstream messaging volumes in enterprise IT today routinely reach the level of 1 million events per second, supporting tens to hundreds of services. This volume is expected to experience a quantum leap soon. Leading-edge companies are already witnessing volumes of 5 million events per second, and this level is expected to rise to 10 million-plus very soon, often supporting thousands of services.

"The messaging infrastructure backbone is at its breaking point," continued Laffey. "Software has reached its limit in ultra-low latency messaging, focusing increasing importance on the hardware 'plumbing' to deliver future performance increases."

In addition to high performance, ultra-low latency messaging requirements, TIBCO Messaging Appliance also helps TIBCO Rendezvous customers reduce costs and gain efficiency in the servers required to support a Rendezvous network. Through the use of TIBCO Messaging Appliance, customers can achieve a 10-to-1 reduction in the number of servers required by their messaging infrastructure, reinforcing TIBCO's commitment to Green IT.

"The P-7500 is the result of our work with literally hundreds of customers worldwide in all major geographies and markets. It addresses an area in critical need of a breakthrough idea. This is just the first in a series of hardware products that TIBCO plans to offer to its customers," Laffey concluded.

TIBCO Messaging Appliance employs a pure hardware approach, utilizing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technologies. TIBCO Messaging Appliance is offered in three different network configurations: 4-1Gb Ethernet connections, 8-1Gb Ethernet connections, and 2 - 10Gb Ethernet connections. Its 375W power consumption delivers new power-use efficiencies, and is the same size as a standard 4U server unit.

TIBCO Messaging Appliance preserves the investment customers have made in their Rendezvous applications by providing drop-in compatibility with existing versions of Rendezvous client libraries. TIBCO Messaging Appliance includes redundant power supplies, fans, and other mechanical components to protect against failure within each appliance, Additionally, it adds built-in hardware fault tolerance for increased reliability and active-active failover between two appliances.