The Solace VMR – It’s About Customer Choice

Editor’s note: We’ve renamed our product suite. The VMR is now referred to as Solace PubSub+. See our products page for more information.

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It all Started in Hardware…

When Solace began in 2001, the key company founding observation was that the volume of real-time information in the world was about to skyrocket, yet the technology that existed to manage and move it was closed, limited and expensive.

Thus was born the Solace message routing appliance; a unique piece of hardware that combines many capabilities in one device:

• Support for multiple APIs and protocols like JMS, OpenMAMA, REST, MQTT to integrate with the majority of existing applications.
• Smart WAN protocols to dramatically improve behavior over long-distance networks.
• Ultra low latency for when microseconds matter.
• Web streaming to hundreds of thousands of mobile users or IoT devices.
• Comprehensive monitoring for the most detailed understanding of application traffic available anywhere.

… all with 50-100 times higher throughput than any comparable technology.

Before Solace entered the market, companies had to buy different products for each of these types of data movement and figure out how to deploy and scale them independently. Of course, making those products work together was your problem. All of the other major commercial suppliers of messaging technology still offer three or four (or more!) different products, each with their own management, APIs, etc.

A decade ago when we shipped our first appliance, our primary advantage was performance. Back then, we didn’t have every feature our competitors had, but if you needed high-end speed, Solace was the best choice. Over time, we filled out our feature set and continued to innovate to move far beyond all competitors. Today, we have the richest product in the market by any measure: performance, completeness, unique features, support for open standards, ease of use and overall value.

We’re very proud of our hardware appliance, and we still get pumped up when our customers tell us they couldn’t run their business without Solace.

The VMR Takes Us Places We’ve Never Been

We’ve known for some time that a hardware appliance was not the best answer to every problem. Deployment options change significantly with the introduction of the Virtual Message Router (VMR), a software message router that complements our appliances.

For example, many of our clients deploy Solace applications in the cloud, but sometimes it makes sense for the broker functionality to be there as well. It turns out you can’t easily plunk a Solace appliance in the Amazon cloud, but a VMR will do the trick. Moving information to and from trains and airplanes as part of the Internet of Things is also better accomplished with something like the VMR. Developers building distributed applications have long asked for the ability to untether and take their work to the coffee shop or other places where they may not be able to connect to a development appliance. Our retail and manufacturing clients want hybrid environments that suit the modest datacenters at their stores or contract manufacturers, but can still handle the aggregate volumes back at headquarters. The VMR is a natural fit for all of these cases.

Feature wise, the new VMR has the same capabilities as our appliance, the two just offer different deployment options. We’ve had customers tells us “we love your products, but they’re overkill for our needs today.” The VMR lets them get going with Solace now, with the flexibility to horizontally scale by deploying more VMR instances, or vertically scale by introducing one of our appliances. No other data movement product gives you that kind of flexibility and futureproofing.

We believe we’ve developed the best way to move information within a distributed system, bar none, and we’re delivering all the options you need to succeed. We’re proud that we’ve become the data movement platform of choice for the most demanding customers in the world, and now we’re ready to bring that power to companies of all sizes.