IBM announces IBM MQ V8

There are some things that come around every day. Good things, like new business and new customers. Other daily occurrences are not so good, like hardware failures, network problems, or security fixes to apply. Then there are some things that come around much less frequently, but they are worth waiting for. Good days like when a new version of IBM MQ is announced. Days like today.

That’s right. At IBM we are happy to announce IBM MQ V8. You can read the announcement letters here: Click here for the announcement letter for IBM MQ V8 on distributed platforms. Click here for the announcement letter for IBM MQ for z/OS V8. And click here for the announcement letter for the various IBM MQ V8 offerings on z/OS with a One Time Charge pricing metric.

There are a lot of new capabilities, and plenty of enhancements and improvements included in the announcements. At this point I will just call out a few of the high level items, and leave myself plenty of opportunity to come back on subsequent blogs and dive a little deeper into some of the new and improved areas.

Let’s start with one of the changes that maybe either big or small depending on your perspective. We are starting, with this version, to call this product IBM MQ, as opposed to WebSphere MQ, mirroring a change you may have seen in some other products in recent years. After all MQ connects your entire infrastructure, so referring to it as IBM MQ rather than WebSphere MQ is perhaps more indicative of that breadth of coverage. It does of course continue to work with all the previous releases of WebSphere MQ, and in fact when you order it and install it, you will still see it as WebSphere MQ, but over time, expect changes in the product to reflect the new branding, while continuing to deliver the same robust messaging infrastructure.

So what else is new? Plenty of course has changed for the better, and many of the changes can be grouped as enhancements to boost both security and scalability, improving support for standards, and also doing more to exploit the hardware being used. This changes should reflect an overall improvement in the ease of use of IBM MQ in this release, simplifying configuration and reducing operational tasks.

From a security point of view, some of the key changes include the authentication of userids defined in the operating system, or in LDAP for distributed platforms. More changes include support for multiple certificate authorities in a single queue manager, and the use of DNS Hostnames in Channel Authentication Records.

From a scalability point of view MQ is now better at scaling to the limits of a SMP machine. And there are various other enhancements, especially for publish-subscribe, including a change in the way clustering works for pub-sub. These changes in scalability are particularly designed to improve real-world scalability, rather than being tuned to demonstrate performance in confected examples.

Notable in new standards is support for JMS 2.0 with new messaging features and updates to the API. Also there are enhancements in Microsoft .NET support as well as WCF extensions. And for improved connectivity options, the function that was previously a part of MQ Telemetry Advanced is now a part of MQ Telemetry, giving customers more for less.

For our customers using MQ on z/OS there are some particularly notable enhancements that offer new capabilities and exploit some of hardware updates likely to be available. There is support for 64 bit buffer pools, and a wider log Relative Byte Address as well as support for the zEDC compression and Coupling Facility Flash. Likely to be of real interest is the announcement that we have removed the Client Attachment Feature, meaning that there will no longer be a charge to connect MQ Clients on other platforms to MQ on z/OS. This applies from today, not just on MQ V8 but on WMQ V7.0.1 and V7.1 as well.

As I said, there is quite a lot of new information to share here. I didn’t even get a chance to mention that the MQ AMS code is now integrated into the base on all platforms, and available on IBM i for the first time. Lots more detail to come so please come back for more, and hopefully I will see you at IBM Impact next week in fabulous Las Vegas.

Tags: Advanced Message Security, Client Attachment Feature, IBM, IBM Impact, IBM MQ, JMS 2.0, MQ, MQ Telemetry Advanced, MQ V8, Publish Subscribe, WebSphere MQ, z/OS