Why Manage 5 Middleware Systems When You Can Consolidate At A Fraction Of The Cost?

Chances are, if you are using middleware, you aren’t just using one system. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a company with mature IT systems to be running five different middleware products, or more.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Obviously there is some history here. Middleware has been around for decades as the glue that companies use to share data between enterprise applications, mainframes, data sources, and other IT components. These applications interact in a wide variety of complex ways, which results in different requirements for connecting applications and sharing data.

"Applications interact in a variety of ways, resulting in different requirements for sharing data."

As a result, many companies have implemented separate middleware products over the past decade or more, each addressing different data-sharing requirements. And in the cases where a 3^rd-party vendors don't provide exactly the right solution, companies build their own middleware implementations, which they must maintain forever.

The Hidden Costs Of Too Much Middleware

Traditionally, implementing individual point products made sense because most applications would only need to share data in one of the following ways:

1. Asynchronous Streaming: real-time transfer of data feeds
2. Guaranteed Messaging: ultra-reliable, transactional records and audit logs
3. Caching: very fast access to commonly-used data
4. Queuing: iterative processing & control flow
5. Data Replication: geographical distribution of data volumes

Besides the obvious costs associated with so many systems for sharing data (software licensing and maintenance), there are a variety of other factors that have been driving up costs for years:

Over-provisioned hardware: The hardware infrastructure required to run these different systems adds up. But with data volumes continuing to explode, the costs of housing temporary and duplicate data is getting out of control. Why replicate big data volumes to geographically dispersed Tier-1 storage arrays when most of that data is not in active use? Why embed expensive storage systems in various places for guaranteed message delivery when commodity solutions would do the job?

Support & Complexity: These interconnected systems have grown more complex over time, becoming increasingly difficult to support. For example, a datacenter might have originally used a queuing system as its hub, but over time added caching and replication services to scale to more users in more regions. Each of these layers of complexity translates directly into added support costs. 

Brain Drain: Every time these application systems were connected together, there was a person – or group of people – responsible for that design and implementation. The connections were documented and the code was managed. And over time, the people who knew those systems best have moved on. This makes the entire system more prone to risk. 

Today’s Apps Need Everything

The applications you are developing today are high-performance, real-time, global applications. They need all these forms of data sharing.

• They need streaming for continuous access to real-time data
• They need guaranteed messaging to ensure that data is delivered around the world accurately.
• They need caching to support the massive scale of real-time data delivery.
• They need queuing to efficiently process and transform massive volumes of data from distributed data sources into a coherent application experience.
• They need data replication to support worldwide demand.

So why use four different products?

Data Fabric: The First Fully-Integrated Middleware System

Tervela offers a solution to this problem, with the first fully integrated middleware solution that combines guaranteed messaging, caching, queuing, and data replication into a single, ultra-reliable, lightning fast data transport system.

"Tervela’s data fabric is the foundation for how applications share data within the datacenter or around the world."

Our hardware appliances and software-based virtual appliances overlay on top of your existing data center infrastructure and cloud services, creating a service-rich fabric for mission-critical distributed applications.

Best of all, with Tervela’s data fabric as the foundation for how your applications share data within the datacenter or around the world, you can finally eliminate those over-provisioned, expensive middleware systems and consolidate into one manageable platform.

Want to know more? Check out the data fabric or get in touch with us.