Solace product innovation — we’re writing our own rules

Here at Solace, we are driven by some audacious goals. We’re literally rewriting the rules on how information moves between all kinds of applications. It doesn’t matter if it’s two computers connected by a 10 GigE link or mobile apps connecting wirelessly from opposite sides of the world. The simple fact is that computers and networks have increased in speed by orders of magnitude, and software middleware has failed to keep up. It was a situation crying out for innovation and we stepped in.

We’ve made it our mission to deliver middleware worthy of today’s distributed needs, and today we’re unveiling three new innovations that make our appliances more performant and reliable than ever.

Next-Generation Guaranteed Messaging

It may seem crazy to spend time doubling the performance of a product that is already 25 times faster than the competition, but we did it anyway. The truth is there aren’t that many guaranteed messaging applications in the world that need 200, 000 messages per second, but many of our customers are consolidating dozens or even hundreds of applications onto a single shared backbone, with our secure hardware virtualization capability partitioning the traffic. It means huge savings and much simpler applications with faster, more reliable performance. Want some details?

Cross-datacenter Disaster Recovery

When we looked at how customers were managing disaster recovery (DR) for software-based products with SAN-based replication tools like SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility from EMC), we knew we could do better. SRDF is great at general purpose SAN storage replication, which is optimized for applications that write once,  preferably in big blocks, and read many times. The problem is, guaranteed messaging is a terrible match for SRDF. It’s about lots of little, short lived operations that only exist while data is in transit. Solace had already cracked the code on using our own patented hardware to take disks out of the critical path and still guarantee delivery, resulting in landmark performance. We’ve also mastered WAN optimized streaming between locations.  Our new disaster recovery solution builds on these prior innovations to blow the doors off SAN-based DR with a solution tailor-made for the unique attributes of guaranteed messaging. If you rely on messaging and care about DR, you really need to check out this 2 minute movie to see some of what makes Solace’s solution so different.

Cascading Caching

In-memory caches are a popular way to accelerate access to frequently used data and improve application response time. Blending in-memory caching with the features of a messaging product is an ideal fit for many real-time applications. Today, we announced that we’ve extended our cache to include transparent, hierarchical mapping of distributed caches so that data automatically resolves to near where it is needed. Solace’s cascading cache combines our high-volume messaging product and unique WAN optimizations to underpin a world-class cache. It’s pretty nifty, click here to learn more.

Conclusion

When some vendors add features to their products, they look at what competitors do and see if they can do it a little better. When Solace tackles an important part of our distributed application vision, we deconstruct the problem and work with our customers to see if there’s a better way to solve it. We aren’t happy unless we’ve changed the game, and today, we did just that. Again.