When 9.1 + 3 equals 2002 – the new MQ Appliance M2002 with MQ V9.1

Children seem to grow up so fast. One day they are new to us, and exploring what they can do, but very quickly they grow up, learn new skills and impress us with their capabilities.

 

For the MQ Appliance it was first released just 3 years ago, as the MQ Appliance M2000. Then 1 year later there was a minor update, released as the M2001 providing bigger, faster SSD storage and more 10Gb networking. Now, stepping out confidently into the world is the 3rd generation of MQ Appliance – the new model M2002, coming out along with the new MQ V9.1 software. Read the announcement letter here.

 

So, what do you need to know about the new model? Many of the benefits are the same. It still is very simple and rapid to deploy and get running. And applying maintenance is also straightforward as a single flash image. And it is still MQ Advanced in a box, with the major benefits of MQ Advanced such as unlimited free connectivity to MFT Agents, end to end message level encryption and access to the Blockchain Bridge. But the M2002 model provides some significant hardware improvements that also lead to pretty outstanding performance improvements.

There are now 24 cores (Intel Skylake architecture with hyperthreading). The storage has expanded with now 4 SSDs, each with 3.2TB capacity. They are now making use of RAID 10, with a doubled RAID cache. And networking has been increased with there now being 6 of the 10Gb network ports. Plus, there are now 40Gb ports – there are 2 pairs of ports, with each pair being able to provide 40Gb in total.

There are still 2 models available – the M2002A and the M2002B. As before the ‘A’ model provides access to the full capacity of the Appliance, including all cores and all storage (about 6TB of usable storage). The M2002B model had access to 6 cores, and access to half of the storage capacity (about 3TB). As before there is an additional capacity option to enable the conversion of the M2002B to the M2002A without any hardware changes or modifications.

 

The combination of the additional number of SSDs and the change to RAID 10 with an increased cache, plus the increased, faster networking means that operational performance can be dramatically increased. Particularly with HA connectivity being able to use the 40Gb networking to reduce latency of the synchronous replication, increased workload can be driven through the appliances at very high rates. Due to various other improvements in MQ V9.1, even customers with the M2001 appliances will see performance boosts.

 

The 40Gb networking ports can be used individually or aggregated together, and while many businesses will yet to have 40Gb networks, if MQ Appliances are in the same rack, they can be cabled directly together.

 

With link aggregation now supported for the 10 Gb network ports, and with 6 of them now provided, the connectivity is far more resilient than before.

 

In another important change, with MQ V9.1’s release, the MQ Appliance will now move to the same mix of Long Term Support and Continuous Delivery releases that have been available for MQ software delivery. MQ V9.1 itself is a Long Term Support release, so MQ Appliance customers will be able to put that into production with stability assured and only fixes in fixpacks, but then subsequent Continuous Delivery updates with additional features will be available, with customers being able to choose to deploy one or other releases on each MQ Appliance.

 

The M2002 models will only be able to have MQ V9.1 or later releases. MQ V9.1 can be installed on all MQ Appliance models, including the M2000 and M2001. With the release of the M2002, the M2001 will be withdrawn from marketing, and the end of support date will be set at 10 July 2023, so that even customers buying the last of the M2001s will get 5 years of regular support. You can read the withdrawal announcement letter here.

 

Another point to note is that the M2002 does not include the Host Bus Adapter that was used in the previous model to provide SAN connectivity. Based on customer feedback, this is no longer viewed as strategic, and will not be progressed any further.

 

The new M2002 Appliances, the 3^rd generation of appliances, will be available later in July, and as before with the previous models of MQ Appliances, will connect easily and seamlessly into existing MQ environments, or be a great way to start out a MQ deployment.

Tags: 40Gb network, IBM MQ, IBM MQ Appliance, IBM MQ Appliance M2002, IBM MQ V9.1, Long Term Support, MQ Appliance M2001, RAID10, SSD, Synchronous Replication