SonicMQ

Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture™ (CAA) provides high availability for SonicMQ message brokers, SonicMQ clients and the communications among clients, brokers, and destinations, thereby eliminating the requirement for expensive RAID, OS clustering software or third-party HA frameworks in the messaging layer. No matter how complex, in-process transactions continue to their destinations without costly roll back or recovery time.

SonicMQ offers a highly available, secure and reliable extension of the messaging backbone to remote offices and business partners. Communications are transparently routed and load balanced across the brokers in the cluster, facilitating the fastest possible communication across the most effective path.

SonicMQ's advanced distributed management and deployment infrastructure dramatically simplifies operations and lowers the total cost of ownership for business-critical communication across the enterprise. Superior authentication, authorization, and encryption support ensures that messages and systems are protected inside and outside the firewall.

With its guaranteed message delivery system that ensures messages are never lost due to software, network, or hardware failure, industry-leading companies depend on SonicMQ for their most complex business transactions and mission-critical communications across the enterprise.

Industry leading companies rely on SonicMQ for mission-critical communications within the enterprise and for connecting remote business partners and customers. Additionally, many ISVs and equipment manufacturers embed SonicMQ as the messaging component of their best-of-breed applications. Out of the box, SonicMQ is a complete, mature messaging system that includes many features that are missing in competitive offerings, saving you time and money from developing your own add-on solutions. With a guaranteed message delivery system that ensures messages are NEVER lost due to any type of software, hardware or network failure, you can depend on SonicMQ for your most complex business transactions.

Benefits of SonicMQ include:

• Promotes reusability of existing assets; simplifies integration with other tools, platforms and applications; minimizes development time and costs, and improves software quality.
  
  
• Expands the pool of skilled staff who can develop, administer and operate the software.
  
  
• Facilitates easy integration of existing Internet applications and wireless devices which depend on firewall-friendly HTTP.
  
  
• Provides better utilization of computing resources – able to provide high throughput with lower hardware and software requirements.
  
  
• Allows any number of applications to receive important information simultaneously.
  
  
• Simplifies connectivity, allowing enterprises to standardize on a usage paradigm independent of location and underlying network infrastructure.
  
  
• Enables applications to be resilient to network failures; Allows users to architect one type of messaging infrastructure for both reliability and high throughput.
  
  
• Significantly reduces complexity and cost of managing the messaging backbone and allows anyone in any location to oversee operations from a single control point.
  
  
• Enables deployments to scale to support large numbers of messages, users and applications across the extended enterprise.
  
  
• Simplifies development and management as brokers can be added transparently to handle increased message traffic.
  
  
• Reduces operational risk by insuring no loss of data.
  
  
• Minimizes network and application downtime in the event of software, network or hardware failure.
  
  
• Eliminates recovery process and interruption of transactions.
  
  
• Allows messaging solutions to scale outside of a single organization without incurring significant administrative overhead.
  
  
• Leverages existing network investments and ensures secure transmission of messages inside and outside the firewall.
  
  
• Allows easy integration with existing security infrastructure, e.g. LDAP and firewalls

• Unsurpassed Scalability and Performance: SonicMQ handles a large number of connections with high-speed, reliable message throughput, providing an extremely performant and scalable, standards-based enterprise messaging system. Each broker supports thousands of persistent messages per second with minimal latency and can handle a vast number of connections and destinations.
  
  
• Advanced Clustering Technology: When the throughput capacity of a single message broker is reached, SonicMQ brokers can be grouped into clusters, which act as a single virtual broker. Brokers are transparently added to the cluster, without requiring development or administration changes to the enterprise messaging system. Clusters can be linked with other clusters via Sonic’s Dynamic Routing Architecture to form a community of clusters that can scale to support large numbers of messages, users and applications across the extended enterprise.
  
  
• Dynamic Routing Architecture (DRA): SonicMQ’s Dynamic Routing Architecture (DRA) technology allows the delivery of messages between applications regardless of the cluster that the application is connected to. In case of a connection failure, (e.g. between regional offices), DRA will route messages via alternative operational paths, and facilitate expansion without incurring significant administrative overhead. Clusters may connect to other clusters as needed, creating highly distributed deployments across loosely-coupled locations.
  
  
• Continuous Availability:  Real-time replication of data is provided between the primary and secondary brokers, reducing the need for additional, expensive hardware or operating system fault tolerant solutions in the messaging layer. In the event that the primary broker becomes unavailable, the secondary broker detects the failure, and immediately accepts client connections, without transactional rollback. Clients are provided with alternative network paths and secondary broker information up front should there be a network or primary broker failure.
  
  
  Figure: Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture
  
  Upon failure, the client seamlessly resumes the connected session that was in progress. Applications can continue to operate without the risk of lost, duplicate, trapped, or out-of-order messages—without the development of complicated error handling solutions or an operations staff on hand to handle these situations. Management services can also be replicated to multiple locations, reducing setup and administration costs.
  
  
• High Performance and Low Latency: Sonic CAA supports both non-persistent and persistent messaging modes. By combining the performance of non-persistent messaging with the reliability and availability of Sonic CAA, you can achieve unparalleled message throughput with extremely low latency.
  
  
• Flexible Continuous Availability Solutions: To provide continuous availability in large scale and diverse deployments, SonicMQ can be configured across heterogeneous hardware platforms. It is not a requirement to have identical hardware for primary and secondary servers. Broker failure and subsequent reactivation is transparent to the cluster, eliminating the need to develop elaborate availability solutions.
  
  
• Comprehensive Out of the Box Security: SonicMQ’s comprehensive authentication and authorization, together with superior encryption support ensures that messages and enterprise system access is appropriately restricted, inside and outside the firewall. SonicMQ is unique in that it comes with its own payload encryption functionality built into the product. This feature allows business applications to enjoy the benefits of secure communications without incurring the performance impact of full SSL channel encryption. Out of the box, SonicMQ includes a variety of selectable cipher suites including DES, with the option of 128, 168, and 256-bit encryption. For advanced security, SonicMQ embeds the leading security product for SSL encryption, RSA’s B-Safe product, which provides up to 256-bit encryption and has been certified to be FIPS-140 compliant. With Sonic, you can also leverage your existing network investments, including:
  
  
  • Ability to plug in third party authentication products for easy integration with existing security infrastructures.
    
    
  • Certificate-based mutual authentication for client-broker and broker-broker SSL connections using PKCS standards.
    
    
  • Support of standards based, single sign-on authentication products.
  
  
  Support for Internet protocols HTTP, HTTPS, SSL, TCP/IP increases the reach of your messaging infrastructure across the firewall, providing end-to-end security across your extended enterprise. Support is also provided for forward and reverse proxy servers, enabling one or more brokers to reside within the DMZ.
  
  
• Extensive Standards-based Connectivity: SonicMQ provides a standards-based approach for integrating applications and components across the extended enterprise. Standards adherence promotes reusability of existing assets; simplifies integration with other tools, platforms, and applications; minimizes development time and costs; and improves software quality.
  
  
• Management Framework: SonicMQ’s Java Management Extensions (JMX)-based infrastructure provides a centralized, standards-based approach for managing and monitoring SonicMQ deployments whenever and wherever management and monitoring are needed. This centralized approach streamlines the management of the entire messaging backbone, which in turn lowers the overall costs associated with supporting the entire enterprise infrastructure.
  
  
• SonicMQ’s management console enables easy configuration, deployment and management of complex multi-broker architectures from a single location. Messaging configuration changes are pushed in real time to brokers that can dynamically reconfigure themselves, resulting in improved system efficiency and decreased management costs.
  
  

SonicMQ’s management environment enables detailed, real-time monitoring and dynamic resource loading, decreasing the time required to diagnose and respond to problems and minimizing system downtime.

useSonicMQ V7.6.2

Below are the supported platforms for the Progress® SonicMQ® Product Family (reflects SonicMQ V7.6.2 release). For a list of supported platforms for functionally stable, mature or retired products, visit our Platform Support Archives page.

Java Client

Platforms supported by SonicMQ v7.6.x Java Client in addition to those supported by the Sonic MQ Broker:

• None

Platforms supported by SonicMQ v7.6.x Java Broker not supported by the SonicMQ v7.6.x Java Client:

• None

HTTP Proxy Servers

The following servers have been certified for forward and reverse proxies with SonicMQ V7.5:

Vendor and Version

• Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2004 SP1
• Apache HTTP Server V2.0.53
• Sun Java Systems Web Proxy Server 4.0

Virtualization

Sonic 7.6.x is supported on any of the “7.6.x supported platforms”, running on the following hosted environments:

• VMWare ESX 3.5
• HP-UX 11iV3 –Itanium2 VSE

Note: For Sonic Workbench (32 bit JVM) the guest operating system is Windows XP.
Products supported on this environment are to include:

• Sonic ESB Product Family
• Sonic MQ Product Family

IBM Zseries

Sonic 7.6.x has support for IBM Zseries with the following Guest operating systems:

• Red Hat 5 running IBM JVM 1.5 64 bit on ZVM
• Suse 10 running IBM JVM 1.5 64 bit on ZVM

Products supported on this environment are to include:

• Sonic ESB Product Family
• Sonic MQ Product Family

Click here for our list of archived platform support pages.