New Product Q&A at 80 Gigabits per Second

Today, we announced a new higher-capacity Network Acceleration Blade (NAB), the card that handles all the intelligent network interactions within a Solace appliance. This newest card features six 10 gigabit Ethernet ports and supports a maximum throughput of 80 gigabits per second (40 Gbps in and 40 Gbps out simultaneously). This raises the ceiling on throughput for each Solace appliance by four times from our already industry-leading levels.

Just how much is 80 Gbps of throughput?

A lot. At that rate you can move 1.7 petabytes of data a day with a pair of Solace appliances. Using the internet’s unofficial unit of content bigness — the text of the Library of Congress, estimated at 10 terabytes — that means you could move the text of all the books in the library of congress in 8.6 minutes, or almost 169 times a day.

Why are you describing messaging throughput in gigabits per second rather than messages per second?

Because messages per second is highly dependent on a given application. Most popular benchmarks measuring messages per second use tiny message sizes like 12 bytes or 100 bytes, but the vast majority of applications send much larger messages — measured in kilobytes and sometimes megabytes or more. Ultimately it’s the amount of data moved, not the units of work done, that defines the throughput limits.

Are there really applications out there that require 80 Gbps of data movement?

Big data anyone? It’s true that not many single applications require that much throughput today, but consider two things: the trend is clearly towards ever escalating data volumes, and many Solace customers run dozens or even hundreds of applications on a shared message bus. We foresee big data, machine-to-machine automation, high-volume trading, private cloud infrastructure, and mobile streaming as the most common ultra-high volume data movement applications that will need more than the 20 Gbps of throughput our current generation of network blades support.

For those that aren’t at these levels yet, we offer a range of Network Acceleration Blades with different levels of throughput. Many customers will choose to deploy with a lower capacity, lower priced NAB, with the option to upgrade once data volumes grow. The important thing is the option to reach these higher thresholds without the problems you typically experience when horizontally scaling software-based middleware.

Is this for new appliances only, or can existing deployments get this performance?

The new 6×10 NAB slots directly into the existing 3260 appliance, so any customer that wants to upgrade has the option to swap out their current NAB for a higher capacity one.