Minutes of system downtime can translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue and lost productivity, especially for high-volume systems such as those found in the financial services and telecommunications industries. SonicMQ provides the most advanced fault tolerant messaging architecture, reducing failover time from minutes to seconds. Most fault tolerant architectures rely entirely on custom coded solutions and expensive hardware- based mechanisms to ensure failover. SonicMQ 6.0 provides a software-based solution out-of-the-box that uses stateful replication between a pair of servers, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware, specialized fault sensing software, and mirrored/redundant disks. SonicMQ 6.0 also significantly eases administrative load, resulting in a significantly simpler and more cost- effective approach to enterprise messaging availability.

"This release significantly raised the standard for enterprise messaging, eliminating shortfalls that have typically plagued messaging environments. With the Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture we're the first to deliver stateful replication between servers in a messaging cluster, reducing failover time to seconds rather than minutes," said Bill Cullen, vice president of products at Sonic Software. "Because it is so easy to use and so much less costly than hardware-based solutions, SonicMQ makes continuous availability feasible for a much broader set of applications and customers."

SonicMQ 6.0 eliminates many of the past obstacles to achieving continuous availability in the messaging infrastructure:

-- Hot Failover--SonicMQ 6.0 uses stateful replication to provide seamless failover in seven to 15 seconds -- rather than seven to 15 minutes -- that is transparent to the receiving client or application. In-process transactions -- no matter how complex -- continue to their destinations without any costly roll back or recovery. Most fault tolerant messaging solutions rely on system replication annd replicated activation to achieve fault tolerance. When a failure occurs, the recovery process frequently needs to roll back transactions -- a time-consuming and expensive operation.

-- Improved Messaging Quality of Service (QoS)--SonicMQ's real-time message replication ensures that messages are never trapped, duplicated or received out-of-order. Most messaging products can leave trapped messages, create duplicate messages or cause messages to be received out-of-order across a failover.

-- First Fully Software-based Fault Tolerant Messaging--SonicMQ provides 'out-of-the-box' software-based configuration of primary and secondary pairs that does not require specialized hardware. Further, 'hot-hot' fault tolerant clusters maximize server utilization and messaging throughput. Typical fault tolerant messaging products require expensive, complex hardware configurations that can tie up corporate resources with redundant servers that sit idle.

-- Ease of Deployment--SonicMQ 6.0 can be configured for continuous availability in minutes. SonicMQ reduces the administrative headaches for organizations already using fault tolerance, while making fault tolerance possible for many applications and locations where it wasn't justified in the past. The high cost and complexity of configuring and managing hardware-based fault tolerant messaging architectures lengthens deployment times, or can rule out the use of fault tolerance altogether.

"The potential impact of system downtime in our messaging infrastructure is simply enormous, with almost all of our trades valued in millions of dollars. The high availability solutions that are out there fall short because even when the brokers come back online, in-flight trades may be lost. SonicMQ 6.0 solves this problem," said John Brann, chief architect at FXall, the leading foreign exchange trading portal. "Configuration was exceptionally easy with SonicMQ 6.0. We literally had our first successful tests completed in less than a day."

"The Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture delivered in SonicMQ 6.0 provides a solid software-based approach to fault-tolerant messaging," said Dennis Byron, vice-president of IDC's Business Process Automation and Deployment Software Research. "It may very well help expand the addressable market for message oriented middleware, providing traditional customers with a more manageable solution, while its cost-effectiveness makes continuously available messaging viable for a whole new class of customers."

"Our customers' businesses depend on their enterprise messaging environments. Minutes of downtime can mean hours of lost productivity and millions in lost revenue," said Peter Graef, partner and managing director of [ipt], a European systems integrator based in Switzerland. "The Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture provides a uniquely superior approach to the challenge of messaging fault tolerance, reducing downtime to seconds and significantly reducing the associated risk and expense to the business."

Pricing and Availability

SonicMQ 6.0 is currently available. The price is $15,000 per fault tolerant pair.