Solace Systems ships unified messaging platform

The Unified Messaging Platform performs all kinds of messaging including ultra-low latency, high fanout, guaranteed message queuing, and WAN distribution, each with much better performance, reliability and scalability than software. The Unified Messaging Platform also handles related functions required by distributed applications such as content routing, message transformation, distributed caching, and integration with other messaging environments and business applications.

"Messaging is undergoing something of a Renaissance. Messaging volumes are growing exponentially because of escalating business requirements and the spread of event processing and cloud computing," said Roy Schulte, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "A variety of new messaging technologies is emerging to address the latency, throughput and quality-of-service needs of modern business."

Over the years, most enterprises have acquired and built many different messaging systems to serve as the infrastructure for their distributed applications. Each must be separately deployed, made redundant, managed and upgraded. The incompatibility of all of this technology means higher costs for development and operations, and requires a large investment in servers and data center resources to keep it all running. Solace's Unified Messaging Platform simplifies this infrastructure to reduce time-to-market for new applications, streamline operations and lower expense.

"Historically, companies have had to cobble together their application infrastructure with one vendor's reliable messaging solution, another's queuing solution, and yet another's low latency solution, then tie them all together with commercial and home-grown adapters," said Shawn McAllister, chief architect at Solace. "By handling all kinds of messaging with one API, Solace's Unified Messaging Platform eliminates the need to train distinct development teams and deploy discrete infrastructure for each kind of messaging."

Separately, Solace Systems, the leader in messaging middleware and content networking hardware, today announced a new high-speed message caching solution to enable the rapid in-memory storage and retrieval of high-speed data as part of the company's Unified Messaging Platform. Such caching is important for market data systems because trading applications frequently need to look up recent quote data to find the last value, or investigate recent instrument activity.

"Caching is an essential component of an end-to-end trading system as well as a useful part of a sensor network," said Shawn McAllister, Solace's chief architect. "We will continue to support integration with third-party caching technology, but the option of a turnkey, high-speed cache saves time and effort for many customers."

The flexible API makes it easy to configure Solace's high-speed cache to meet specific application requirements. For example, applications could request the last 1,000 messages for an instrument, or sensor data from the last 24 hours. The high-speed cache supports requests for individual topics, or groups of topics as well as the ability to resolve consistency issues when new data is entering a cache as stored data is being requested.

Separately, Solace Systems, the leader in messaging middleware and content networking hardware, and Adaptris, a leading provider of SOA-ready application adapters, today announced a partnership to connect Solace's hardware with a wide range of messaging and application environments as part of Solace's Unified Messaging Platform. Adaptris provides over 50 adapters for common types of middleware and popular business applications.

"No technology exists in a vacuum; every customer environment has other commercial or home-grown middleware as well as business applications that need to be connected to their Solace backbone," said Shawn McAllister, chief architect, Solace Systems. "Adaptris fills this need with a variety of pre-built adapters and a flexible framework as well as a wealth of practical experience expanding to support unique requirements."

Many enterprises have multiple islands of middleware, along with hundreds of applications and databases that need to interact and share information. Adapters and bridges function as the 'on-ramps' from these applications, databases and other middleware to the Solace backbone to enable ubiquitous application connectivity and sharing of enterprise data assets. Through this partnership, the Adaptris framework allows firms to easily create and manage connections between Solace's Unified Messaging Platform and legacy middleware environments, applications and databases.

"Working with customers to deliver highly performant, reliable and integrated solutions is all about making it simple to connect their new and their existing heterogeneous environments in a reliable way," said Jeff Bradshaw, CTO, at Adaptris. "Solace Systems offers a content delivery infrastructure with amazing performance and resiliency that we are proud to extend to a wider footprint of enterprise information sources."

Separately, Solace Systems, the leader in messaging middleware and content networking hardware, today announced a partnership with SL Corporation, a leading provider of real-time monitoring, analytics and visualization software. SL's widely-adopted RTView platform will be used with Solace's content router management framework to provide customers with a visual, real-time way of monitoring, analyzing and managing the many types of messaging supported by Solace's Unified Messaging Platform.

Solace's hardware-based messaging products can gather an array of metrics in real-time with zero impact on performance. The combined solution allows network and middleware operations teams to fully leverage this detailed real-time information. Through RTView's customizable dashboards, alerts and reports, network managers have the ability to view, plot, analyze and respond in real-time to events occurring within their Solace network and other RTView-supported products.

"Monitoring and management are critical aspects of maintaining the competitive advantage that a hardware-based messaging infrastructure provides," said Shawn McAllister, chief architect at Solace Systems. "SL's RTView is a highly effective means of keeping global deployments operating at peak efficiency, and will bring immediate value to our customers."

In addition to its robust monitoring capabilities, RTView enables users to archive historical performance data and compare it to real-time data for both trending analysis and capacity planning.

"Solace's hardware-based messaging network is pushing the boundaries of performance, and as speeds and throughput increase so does the requirement for robust monitoring," said Rodney Morrison, SL's vice president of products. "RTView was built from the ground up to handle real-time information efficiently and we are excited to be working with Solace to monitor and manage the next generation of network-based messaging."