Sonic Software

1
Sonic Software

• WebSphere MQ Competitive Overview

Bob Trabucchi
2
Agenda

• MQSeries 5.2 Competitive Postmortem
• WebSphereMQ 5.3
• Competing against WebSphere MQ 5.3

3
IBM MQSeries

• 65 market share
• Over 3,000 international customers
• Integration for 35 platforms
• Considered de facto standard for reliable
  messaging
• Currently used by most fortune 500 companies

4
MQSeries 5.2

• Released in January 2001
• Claim improved performance for persistent
  messaging (factor of 5)
• Not standards based (proprietary APIs)
• JMS wrapper supplied with product
• Pub/sub not supported on all platforms
• Clustered servers, load balancing and hot
  standby

5
MQSeries 5.2 Landmines

• Slow performance
• High cost of ownership.
• Limited Pub/Sub queue-based model
• JMS wrapper not integrated
• Limited Internet usefulness
• Mom product at core
• Limited XML support

6
Reality Check

• MOM product at the core can be a plus!
• Proven track record
• Fortune 500 have MQSeries expertise
• doesnt matter if its bogus to use.
• MQSeries site licenses hide costs from groups
  doing implementation.
• Internet use to date is not a big differentiator.

7
Reality Check

• Performance is still king!
• Security and guaranteed delivery are extremely
  important.

8
Agenda

• MQSeries 5.2 Competitive Postmortem
• WebSphereMQ 5.3
• Competing against Websphere MQ 5.3

9
Scope of work

• Goals of 6 week effort
• Assume the role of customer and evaluate the
  WebSphere MQ 5.3 experience.
• Develop test harness to exercise both products on
  a level playing field
• Produce proof points that give sales force
  improved competitive traction

10
MQSeries 5.3

• Beta released May 24th, 2002
• Improved JMS specific performance
• Improved security story
• Allows SSL-based encryption vs. 3rd-party only
• JMS fully integrated within product
• Improved support for clustered queue managers
• Workload balancing
• Connection failover

11
WebSphere MQ OOBE

• Building point-to-point, queue-based is equally
  easy in both SonicMQ and Websphere MQ products.
• GUI Explorer tools
• Create, start, stop queue managers
• Create and manage queues

12
WebSphere MQ Explorer
13
SonicMQ Explorer
14
WebSphere MQ 5.3 weakness

• Pub/Sub is still not integrated and frustrating
  to use
• No tutorials or documentation for Java
• Supplemental download (uses same as 5.2)
• Complete add-on architecture
• Not integrated with admin tools
• Trouble shooting is cryptic
• Using topics is problematic
• No topic heirarchies
• No cluster-wide topics

15
Java is an still and afterthought

• Java is a second class citizen
• Only two code samples
• No Java-based tutorials
• Sample Java pub/sub app doesnt work in some
  cases (without JNDI)
• MQSeries.net JMS newsgroup is useless.

16
WebSphere MQ 5.3 weakness

• We still have much better performance
• We still have a better security story
• We still have a better clustering story

17
MQSeries Terminology

• Queue Manager creates, manages and maintains
  queues
• Clusters grouping of queue managers that work
  cooperatively.
• Participants exchange messages via named queues
• Broker a pub/sub server component that creates,
  manages, and maintains topics
• Broker network cluster of pub/sub brokers

18
WebSphere MQ PTP JMS Architecture
19
WebSphere MQ 5.3 Pub/Sub JMS Architecture
Subscriber
Publisher
Broker
Queue Manager
20
WebSphere MQ 5.3 Pub/Sub JMS Architecture
Publisher
Subscriber
Broker
Queue Manager
21
Pub/Sub Broker responsibilities

• Listen for publishers
• Listen for subscribers
• Maintain list of topics and subscribers
• Maintain links with other brokers
• Maintain links with queue manager

22
Pub/Sub Broker vs. Queue manager

• Broker is a MQSeries application
• Depends on Queue manager for all persistent
  storage and queue functions.

Massive Overhead !!!
23
WebSphere MQ Broker Network
Publisher
Subscriber
New York
Tokyo
24
Agenda

• MQSeries 5.2 Competitive Postmortem
• WebSphereMQ 5.3
• Competing against Websphere MQ 5.3

25
Where do we win?

• Prospect needs
• Real-world publish/subscribe capabilities
• Cares about high end performance
• Worries about greater performance for secure
  applications.
• Wants reliable, pub/sub cluster capabilities
• Lower TCO

26
Performance Where do we win?

• High volume
• Lots of concurrently connect clients
• Lots of topics and queues
• 50 is where the differences start to appear
• The larger the message size, the better

27
Security Where do we win?

• Security topologies that must be highly
  performant
• Variety of cipher suites
• Flexible encryption options
• Per message, message-payload
• Prospects with tight firewall restrictions

28
Clustering Where do we win?

• Pub/Sub environment
• Broker network is no Queue Manager cluster!
• Topics are not cluster wide.
• No load balancing
• No failover
• Where administration resources are limited
• Inflexible IP address hard coding required

29
Where do we lose?

• Prospect has
• MQSeries experts in house
• MQSeries site license
• Unlimited coding resources
• Queue-based point-to-point application
  requirements with small message sizes.
• Total cost is of no concern

30
Where do we lose?

• SonicMQ performance is benchmarked using
• Connection time
• Small numbers of messages
• Small message sizes

31
SonicMQ vs. MQSeries win!

• onStar is a actually a subsidiary of IBM, but
  they have been successful in going against the
  IBM bias in the past

32
OnStar

• Replaced 3rd party
• Organization open to 3rd party products
• Primary use for pub/sub domain
• Clustering environment
• topics need to be available cluster-wide
• parallel load balanced queue processing
•  C/C client

33
From the lab..

• Test Harness
• Modified to run against standard WebSphere MQ 5.3
  installation
• Test Configuration
• NT Server, 550 mhz, 4CPU
• For QM, Brokers etc.
• 2 NT 886 mhz, 2 CPU
• 1 to Receive/Subscribe
• 1 to Send/Publish

34
SonicMQ V4.0 v MQ Series 5.3
Point-to-Point
Persistent
Non Persistent
1400
1500
1000
1000
600
500
200
0
0
1k
10k
1k
10k
Message Size
Message Size
MQSeries 5.3
SonicMQ 4.0
MQSeries 5.3
SonicMQ 4.0
35
SonicMQ V4.0 v MQ Series 5.3
Pub/Sub
Persistent
Non Persistent
8000
8000
6000
6000
4000
4000
2000
2000
0
0
1k
10k
1k
10k
Message Size
Message Size
MQSeries 5.3
SonicMQ 4.0
MQSeries 5.3
SonicMQ 4.0
36
Recap Where we win

• Need highly performant pub/sub with real
  clustering capabilities
• Performance critical architectures
• Require security were there is currently none.
• Require security with high performance
• TCO matters

37
Still to come..

• Competitive info for Websphere MQ is a work in
  progress
• No durable subscription numbers
• No reliability numbers/data
• Need to test secure configurations
• Need to test clustering capabilities

38
Sonic Software

• WebSphere MQ Competitive Overview

Bob Trabucchi