Introducing Solace 3500 Series and SolOS 7.0 — Many Big Steps Forward

Today is an exciting day for us at Solace, and for our customers. This morning we announced a huge step in the evolution of our products with so many improvements – most of which would be big news on their own – that I don’t know where to start. There’s something big for everybody in this release, from architects to developers to your CIO!

It was tough, but I picked my four favorite features to talk about today:

• Less is more. First off is our new 3500 series message routers, the Solace 3560 and Solace 3530, next-generation versions of our Solace 3260 and Solace 3230, respectively. The Solace 3560 provides the same performance as our old top-of-the-line 3260 chassis in half the space (2 rack units vs. 4), effectively doubling throughput per rack unit. For customers who have lots of message routers and those who use them in colocation centers, this shrinkage is very welcome.

• More is more too. Our engineering team turned the screws on our SolOS firmware. Along with other improvements, the new 7.0 release boosts guaranteed messaging performance from an already unrivaled 200, 000 msgs/sec to 450, 000 guaranteed messages per second, and up to 1.6 million messages per second with fanout. Remember, that’s fully failsafe delivery with high availability! This means you can easily meet the needs of the most demanding middle office and big data applications or, by utilizing the virtualization we support, consolidate dozens of discrete message brokers onto a single message router (paired for HA). Combined with the smaller size of the new 2U 3560 that means four times the throughput per rack unit! Check out this video to see our persistent messaging performance in action.

• Bigger is better. Another key improvement of SolOS 7.0 is aimed at the consumer web market and Internet of Things — support for 200, 000 concurrent connections per device. Now high-volume applications like IoT platforms and online gaming/betting platforms can terminate 200, 000 websocket or COMET connections on a single message router, with all the messaging features that come baked into SolOS.

• Stronger is always better! Slow consumers are the nemesis of persistent messaging systems – debilitating most of them in any kind of event-driven or real-time use case. For a long time Solace has been known for our unique ability to make sure slow consumers don’t impact other applications, and with SolOS 7.0 we’ve implemented new patent-pending techniques that make our products completely immune to the ripple effects of slow consumers. How great would it be if you never had to worry about slow consumers impacting your system again? Check out this detailed demonstration, and then run these tests on your current messaging infrastructure – if you dare.

It’s important to note that these SolOS 7.0 improvements apply to our existing message routers – not just the new 3500 series.

I’d like to thank the many customers who provided direction and feedback that went into these latest innovations. We look forward to continuing to push the envelope by taking many more big steps in terms of the performance, capacity and robustness of our technology.

.

Shawn McAllister

Chief Technology Officer & Chief Product Officer

Shawn McAllister is responsible for the strategy and delivery of the Solace PubSub+ Event Streaming and Management Platform. He leads a team of incredibly talented engineers and architects in this endeavor.

McAllister has worked with many of our clients to help them adopt an event-driven architecture and to learn first-hand their needs as input to the innovation built into the PubSub+ Platform. He has participated in the definition of various OASIS messaging protocol standards, including MQTT 3.1.1, MQTT 5.0, and AMQP1.0.

Before joining Solace, McAllister led software, hardware, and test engineering teams at Newbridge Networks (later Alcatel Canada), where he was responsible for developing features on ATM and Ethernet switches as well as the 7750 Multiservice IP Router.

McAllister holds a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, with majors in both Computer Science and Combinatorics/Optimization.

See all posts written by Shawn McAllister