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Check out our Message Medium blog to find out what’s going on in the hardware-accelerated, low-latency messaging world. Messaging Infrastructure TestingSeptember 30, 2009 at 2:30 pm
My radar goes off when legacy vendors with legacy products announce non-legacy performance numbers. “Wow,” I say, “I’m very interested in hearing more about the innovation.” Often, however, the innovation is in the testing and not in the architecture. Recently, one of the “big boys” called out Tervela when they touted the performance numbers of their new-and-improved-legacy-messaging.
I decided to check out their testing methodology. I couldn’t help but scratch my head on the lab and testing.
Years ago I had some excellent labs that would benchmark and test infrastructure performance and reliability: WANs, LANs, apps, etc. The challenge my group had was not in setting up in infrastructure, but rather in establishing flows that would test real world scenarios, edge cases, etc. This was hard and – at times - non-scientific. The interdependencies and varying load conditions made it nearly impossible to model. That didn’t stop us and we called it dirty water testing. Clean water testing was just the opposite: simple, deterministic, and unrealistic. We did both, but the dirty water mimicked real-world. We had no surprises when we went into production.
I want to applaud the big boys for calling us out after their clean water test. As a courtesy, please check out our testing methodology and the results for messaging infrastructure testing. It’s dirty water and it’s why a Tervela messaging infrastructure works as advertised. We’ll discuss their approach later. (And their less-than-green footprint, too.)
If you can't see the whole messaging infrastructure testing article, email me and I'll send you a copy.
Regards, TMX-500 Design PhilosophyJune 30, 2009 at 1:00 pm
We announced the Tervela TMX-500 Message Switch last week at SIFMA to a great deal of fanfare. Attendee response to the new offering was entirely positive, many echoing the word “wow.” We had it running and opened up for all to see. Based on some questions at the show, I wanted to take a couple of minutes to share what was behind the announcement and illuminate our design philosophy.
Planning for the TMX-500 began in 2008, some time after the TMX-1000 was publicly available and in-production at top-tier financial services firms: investment banks, hedge funds, broker-dealers, etc. We had a good deal of experience to work from. It’s worth noting that we saw demand for a complementary, smaller message switch from Tervela, so now we offer both the TMX-500 and the TMX-1000.
We run a continual and disciplined product management process at Tervela, one that is very much market-driven. We spend a great deal of time with customers (business leaders and technical architects), third-party thought leaders, standards groups, ISVs, systems integrators, and perhaps – most importantly – people who would never buy a hardware-accelerated messaging solution. Over my career, I have found this last group to be a treasure trove of product requirements. They also, ironically, become the largest purchasing group of the products they say they’d never buy.
So what were the drivers? What did the market want? What did customers and prospects want?
They wanted hardware-accelerated messaging, but in a smaller form factor that gave them deployment options for workgroups, data centers, co-lo facilities, etc. We brought it down to 2U (1U = 1.75 inches).
They wanted deployment flexibility. We can multi-home to diverse networks through 16 x 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports or trunk through 4 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
They wanted to scale linearly without pain. We can connect 1 to 16 TMX-500s into a single unified fabric.
They wanted to reduce the data center footprint. Our first TMX-500 customer order reduces 2+ racks of messaging servers by 92% (!) to 5U (2 x 2U TMX-500s + a 1U TPM management platform).
They wanted to cut power consumption, too. The TMX-500 tops off at 250 watts, but runs steady state in the 100s. This is a big deal. More on it in a subsequent post.
They wanted real economics. We gave them great CapEx, OpEx and TCO with the TMX-500. Software solutions can’t match it.
They wanted the Tervela differentiators: high-performance, low-latency, scalability, and a seamlessly integrated fabric. We didn’t compromise. In fact, we made them better.
They wanted insane reliability. We went solid state, added more environmental sensors, variable-rate N+1 fans, redundant power, ECC protected memory, etc.
They wanted future-proofing. The combination of programmable ASICs and Tervela’s operating system for messaging, TVOS, ensures future support without any compromise.
They wanted to beat their competition. We gave them the TMX-500.
There’s much, much more. Please let me know if you’d like additional details.
Regards, |
