| Issue 2, 2012 |
Bigger. Faster. Mobile. Social. Cloud. Today’s demands on IT infrastructure are changing rapidly, which means Messaging platforms are being required to do things they were never designed for. Software AG’s recent acquisition of my-Channels brings Messaging to the forefront, ready to meet these challenges, and more!
Universal Messaging
Gone are the days when an organization could make-do with a traditional or commodity messaging platform. In the world of financial trading, microseconds can mean the difference between making or losing a lot of money. Cheap storage means companies want to collect and analyze massive amounts of data. Organizations are rapidly exploring the Cloud and many are already actively using it. And almost everyone wants mobile access to the enterprise, to make them as effective out of the office as in.
All of these developments are changing the way data is moved: more data needs to move faster, reaching new users and new devices, using infrastructure on premise or in the cloud. Some software vendors have addressed these requirements by acquiring or developing a range of messaging products. However, many customers now need to bridge between these technologies, creating a patchwork messaging infrastructure that is complex, expensive and difficult to manage.
Software AG is pleased to introduce webMethods Nirvana Messaging, a single, universal messaging platform that covers all these requirements – and more.
A Little History
In April this year, Software AG announced the acquisition of London-based my-Channels and its universal messaging product Nirvana. My-Channels was founded in 1999 to address the needs of the emerging single-dealer platform (SDP) market. Banks needed to remain competitive and agile to meet ever-changing customer demands for delivery of price aggregation, trade execution and post-trade services to tens of thousands of clients across a wide variety of platforms, including mobile and web. Nirvana allowed them to execute this “last-mile messaging”. But more importantly, Nirvana’s visionary architecture is flexible and extensible, allowing it to continually evolve to meet changing demands. My-Channels’ customers soon recognized the flexibility and potential of the Nirvana platform and gradually spread its use to more traditional enterprise messaging, often displacing well-established messaging vendors. This removed the need to create bridges between messaging platforms, thus reducing complexity, improving performance and simplifying maintenance.
In the economic turmoil of recent years, Nirvana has proven itself in the most demanding of conditions. Uncertainty and volatility in financial markets led to huge peaks in trading volumes that taxed many banks’ core systems and pushed some of them beyond breaking point. Throughout these challenging times, Nirvana was rock-solid, never failed and continued to perform predictably and reliably.
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Last-Mile Messaging The term “last mile” is used in telecommunications to refer to the final leg of delivering connectivity to an end-customer. It is often the most difficult and costly part to deliver due to the massive fan-out of wires and cables from the network backbone to each home. Last-mile messaging is the delivery of messaging capabilities from the messaging backbone (within an organization’s network) out to individual clients and devices, often on networks outside the organization’s control, such as the Internet.
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Nirvana APIs And Protocols
What makes Nirvana unique is its wide variety of client APIs, spanning three main delivery channels: enterprise, web and mobile. There are clients for all major technologies, platforms and languages, including Java, JMS, C++, C#, Flash, Silverlight, JavaScript, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and others.
The APIs across these platforms are consistent and interoperable, meaning a developer only needs to learn the API once and can then use it in almost any language or environment.
The choice of delivery protocols ranges from ultra-efficient in-memory transport, to multicast and unicast using sockets or HTTP(S). Changing from one to the other is simply a matter of changing a connection string. Customers can easily tailor the delivery protocol to meet their specific use-case and network topology.
Enterprise-Class Features
Nirvana is a pure Java application providing many enterprise-class features; testimony to the 12 years of development that have been invested in it.
- There is a comprehensive management and administration API that actually uses “Nirvana to manage Nirvana”. All administrative activities can be done remotely using the same reliable protocols used for message transport.
- The Enterprise Manager tool provides users with a single, easy-to-use UI for centrally configuring, monitoring and administering any number of Nirvana servers.
- Nirvana supports full active-active clustering, without the need for third-party hardware or software. It replicates both data and transactional state across the cluster to ensure guaranteed delivery, even in case of server failure.
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Geographic routing of messages between servers, clusters and data centers can be achieved using so-called “joins”.
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Conflation and throttling can be used to carefully control loads on resource-constrained clients.
- Nirvana has a complete set of security features, including granular ACLs, certificate-based authentication and transports, firewall traversal and detailed audit events.
Enterprise-Class Performance
Nirvana’s performance competes with the fastest low-latency products available, while also providing very fast throughput for persistent messaging.
- Ultra low-latency using shared-memory transport: < 4 µs latency
- Linear scalability to ‘000s of clients using multicast transport: < 50 µs latency to > 5000 clients
- High sustainable update rate using unicast transport: 50 msg/sec to > 5000 clients with < 1ms latency
- High throughput of persistent JMS messages: > 55,000 msg/sec
Integration in the webMethods Suite
webMethods Nirvana Messaging 7, released June 2012, is a JMS provider for use with several webMethods (8.2 SP2) products, including Integration Server, BPM and webMethods Business Events
webMethods 9.0 is scheduled for release at the end of 2012. webMethods Nirvana Messaging will be fully integrated into the suite for this release and its version number updated to reflect this. You will be able to install Nirvana using Software AG Installer and a standard Software AG license key will be used to unlock it. Look out for other exciting developments as Nirvana is used to enhance other areas of the Software AG portfolio, such as Mobile Middleware, Business Events, Process Intelligence and Terracotta.
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What About webMethods Broker? webMethods Broker is at the heart of over 2000 customers’ integration and ESB platforms and provides easy-to-use, reliable messaging that suits most customers with these common use-cases. Software AG will continue to support and develop webMethods Broker.
webMethods Nirvana Messaging provides advanced capabilities in terms of high-end performance, active-active clustering and a wide range of clients and will therefore complement the webMethods portfolio alongside webMethods Broker.
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Ready For The New Era In Messaging
webMethods Nirvana Messaging is an exciting addition to the webMethods platform which will open up a wealth of new possibilities to Software AG customers. If you have particularly high performance requirements, advanced high-availability needs or you want to connect web or mobile clients to your enterprise messaging platform, then Nirvana is for you!
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TRY NIRVANA FOR YOURSELF Installing and setting up Nirvana is easy! You can download a trial version of Nirvana 7 here: softwareag.com/GetNirvana
It comes with a lot of documentation, samples and demos to get you up and running within hours! If you are interested in purchasing Nirvana, please contact your Software AG account team.
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