MQ was the default. Now, it’s a barrier.
What was once a default messaging layer for your on-premises IBM estate
is now a barrier to your enterprise’s modernization.
Agility: Sacrificed
Lack of in-service upgrades, restrictive public-cloud integration, and rigid topic management are all barriers to real-time use cases.
HA/DR: Underwhelming
Prone to split-brain scenarios and needs expensive licenses to implement proper HA/DR.
Consistency: MIA
Protocol support, DR support, and upgrade paths all significantly vary by form factor.
Event-Driven: 404!
Built for batch processing and request/reply interactions, it cannot help you sense and respond to business events.
We have helped enterprises reduce their MQ estate with the following model:
Solace PubSub+ Platform helps enterprises design, deploy, and manage event-driven applications across their hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and IoT environments. For a closer look at how PubSub+ overcomes the limitations of IBM MQ, download this datasheet.
Banks, capital markets, telcos… they are all moving on
Large American Bank
This bank was spending a massive amount of time and money maintaining and upgrading MQ. As payments modernized, they wanted to event-enable their infrastructure so they could publish credit card authorization events to other applications for purposes such as loyalty programs and fraud prevention.
They consolidated 1,500 IBM MQ QManagers to just 14 PubSub+ appliances. They event-enabled numerous applications, including those running on the Mainframe (TPF), which can now publish to the event mesh via MQTT. They also used PubSub+ to connect many apps that rely on WebSphere, IBM Integration Bus, and DataPower.
“Upgrading MQ used to take 30 engineers a year and cost about $10 million. Two engineers just upgraded all of our PubSub+ appliances in 9 days at virtually no cost.” -Director of Middleware
They consolidated 1,500 IBM MQ QManagers to just 14 PubSub+ appliances. They event-enabled numerous applications, including those running on the Mainframe (TPF), which can now publish to the event mesh via MQTT. They also used PubSub+ to connect many apps that rely on WebSphere, IBM Integration Bus, and DataPower.
“Upgrading MQ used to take 30 engineers a year and cost about $10 million. Two engineers just upgraded all of our PubSub+ appliances in 9 days at virtually no cost.” -Director of Middleware
British Financial Services Firm
Like many companies, this financial institution used MQ as its core messaging backbone for decades.
They wanted to move toward a simpler, homogenous event-driven core communication fabric, and after evaluating PubSub+ and Apache Kafka they picked PubSub+. Their current payment application is even communicating to PubSub+ directly from the Mainframe via zOS using the Solace JMS APIs. This gives the end-to-end DevOps, including monitoring and tracking across an event mesh, that delivers many performance and cost benefits.
They wanted to move toward a simpler, homogenous event-driven core communication fabric, and after evaluating PubSub+ and Apache Kafka they picked PubSub+. Their current payment application is even communicating to PubSub+ directly from the Mainframe via zOS using the Solace JMS APIs. This gives the end-to-end DevOps, including monitoring and tracking across an event mesh, that delivers many performance and cost benefits.
Large Indian Telco
This company had serious technical issues with IBM MQ. Their most significant pain point was burst-handling for their prepaid recharge. As MQ could not handle the load, the prepaid recharge flows (20K messages per second) were handled via files in batches.
They migrated their prepaid recharge flows to PubSub+ so pre-paid recharge requests could flow in real-time. PubSub+ handles bursts by buffering messages so they can be delivered ASAP without ever putting back-pressure on publishing applications. The result: 97.5% of recharges now happen in less than 5 seconds.
They migrated their prepaid recharge flows to PubSub+ so pre-paid recharge requests could flow in real-time. PubSub+ handles bursts by buffering messages so they can be delivered ASAP without ever putting back-pressure on publishing applications. The result: 97.5% of recharges now happen in less than 5 seconds.
Your problem is our problem.
We can help you modernize. Use the following resources to build a case to modernize your middleware:
The time to modernize your middleware is now
4 Steps to Minimize your Legacy Middleware Estate
20 Event and Data Streaming Requirements for 2020
Ready to migrate from IBM MQ?
Let us look at the approach
we take for common IBM environments:
App Connect Enterprise (ACE)
The following picture depicts a typical deployment of ACE with MQ and transaction hosts:
ACE is used for integrating with transaction hosts like mainframe and mid-range-based applications, among others, and has connectivity nodes for MQ and Mainframe using Cobol copybook.
Migration strategy:
- Replace MQ Cluster (non-MQI applications) with Solace VPN
- Create the corresponding queue on Solace VPN
- ACE brokers can talk to Solace using JMS or JCA adapter
- It only requires connectivity replacement
- The integration with IMS/CICS can remain as-is
After the migration, native JMS applications will be unchanged as Solace supports JMS 1.1 specs. Application servers can communicate with Solace either on JMS or using the JCA resource adapter.
Using DataPower to Connect to the Mainframe
Migration strategy:
- DataPower to MQ flows can be replaced with REST over HTTP POST connectivity to Solace
- MQ Queues (Local as well as Cluster Queue) can be replaced by Solace Queue / Durable Topic endpoints
- DataPower integration with other endpoints should remain the same except for replacement of MQ connectivity endpoints
Using DataPower as a B2B/B2C Gateway
Typically, DataPower appliances are hosted in a DMZ, passing traffic to a core network containing another set of DataPower appliances or an MQ Cluster. PubSub+ is a natural choice for MQ replacement in this scenario as it provides a complete datapath eliminating MQ clusters.
The migration strategy in this scenario:
- Replace DataPower to MQ flows with REST over HTTP POST connectivity to Solace
- Replace MQ Queues (Local as well as Cluster Queue) with Solace Queue / Durable Topic endpoints
Quick Start Guides
WebSphere Application Server
Integration Guide
