Ensuring your business and customers see you as Highly Available thanks to MQ Advanced

How high is high? If you are considering climbing, then Everest is pretty high after all at 8848M above sea level. Although without the right equipment, team and preparation, trying to climb just 2M can be impossible. But ‘high’ is used in other contexts as well. Like when you are trying to keep a business running these days. If you are then it’s likely the high you may be thinking about is High Availability. Without the right approach, tools and infrastructure you may be trying to solve a problem that can seem to be the same scale as Everest.

With business becoming more global, and being more responsive to events, and with mobile or web traffic coming direct from partners, customers or suppliers, downtime has to be avoided. How do you keep your systems up, your applications running and your data available all the time? Even when, inevitably, there are failures?

IBM MQ is a critical part of your business connectivity. It provides a reliable, secure, scalable and robust middleware layer connecting applications, systems and services and exchanging data between them. Making use of IBM MQ ensures your applications can be simpler and more agile, yet more reliable, and also easier to shift between deployment environments. Your applications will rely on IBM MQ persisting their messages, ensuring that messages are never lost. How do you reap these rewards of simpler applications unless the MQ middleware is highly available to ensure the applications can keep running?

 

Having been around for 25 years, IBM MQ understands this need very well. As such it provides a variety of ways to configure and manage High Availability. And the most recent innovation, based on the High Availability approach used in the MQ Appliance is designed to not only offer extremely robust and effective high availability, but at the same time ensuring it is simple to set up and maintain, without additional external complexity: Replicated Data Queue Managers.

 

Many clients were facing the same set of problems: they didn’t like the costs and complexity of providing and maintaining network attached storage, which was a common way of providing high availability for MQ. The request was high availability that was more self-contained, without external dependencies. A way to deploy MQ in highly available configurations without the requirement for an environment that needs lots of setup, with highly skilled resources and additional costs.

With IBM MQ V9.1, our new Long-Term Support release, customers can now take advantage of Replicated Data Queue Managers, which offer a 3-node configuration, making use of replicated local storage, which make the MQ messages available on each of 3 MQ systems, instead of relying on a single copy of data on network storage.

 

Instead of requiring lots of setup, and ongoing extensive maintenance, MQ itself will do almost all the setup during the initial MQ install. Then, when you are creating a Queue Manager, you simply request it as a RDQM resource, and that’s pretty much all that’s needed. And it’s not just simple in the configuration of the Queue Managers. As it supports Floating IP, when one Queue Manager fails, and another instance automatically starts up on one of the other 2 nodes, the original Queue Manager IP address will move with it, meaning the applications are essentially unaware of the move, and the workload is uninterrupted as the messages and logs had been kept up to date synchronously on all 3 systems.

 

With an additional option allowing for manual startup in a replicated pair of systems by choosing either synchronous or asynchronous replication to provide Disaster Recovery configurations, this new approach to HA really goes a long way to make it much simpler to reach the highest peaks of high availability.

 

There are already a few places to look for more information on this exciting new development. There is a technical blog entry by John Colgrave, along with a GitHub community, and of course the Knowledge Center.

 

Suitable for customers on RedHat Linux on the x86 platform, you need MQ Advanced licensing on just one system node, and MQ Advanced High Availability Replica licensing on the other 2 nodes. Also, this can’t be used with container deployments – but virtual machine images or bare metal is fine. With RDQM now part of the Long-Term Support release of MQ V9.1, you can scale the highest peaks of availability. You are not starting at base camp. You are already close to the summit. Let’s get to the top.

 

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.

Flash aaaahh – saviour of the universe: IBM MQ Appliance M2001

Anyone who is a fan of cheesy sci-fi movies, or soundtracks by Queen will have the words “Flash, Flash I love you but we only have 14 hours to save the earth” running through their head, along with the line in the song that goes “Flash aaaaah, saviour of the universe”. And of course he did save the universe from Ming the Merciless.

But what if I told you Flash could also save your business? Not Flash Gordon of course, but flash storage, in the form of the SSDs that are now a part of the IBM MQ Appliance M2001 which is now generally available (June 10th 2016). We did cover this in an earlier blogpost, but I thought I would take advantage of our initial shipment date to cover just how critical the IBM MQ Appliance, backed by state of the art 3.2TB SSDs can be to your business.

Each MQ Appliance M2001 model has 2 of the 3.2TB SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration. This means that every persistent message and all log data is written not just once to the SSD storage, but twice giving you complete redundancy of data. And a key part of the MQ Appliance functionality is the High Availability configuration – essentially nothing more than a simple menu option when creating a queue manager – allowing you to have the MQ queue manager on one MQ Appliance synchronously replicated to another MQ Appliance. This means that any message written to the SSDs on one MQ Appliance is not just copied to the second pair of SSDs but is written under the same unit of work that writes the messages on the first MQ Appliance. This therefore means you have 4 copies of the message stored for both reliability and availability.

Another part of the MQ Appliance update was the ability to do not just synchronous replication for High Availability but also asynchronous replication for Disaster Recovery to another MQ Appliance. Therefore you can point the MQ queue manager at another, typically off-site MQ Appliance and the same message will replicate there, ensuring there are another 2 copies of the message, and providing your business with a highly resilient messaging system designed to ensure optimum reliability and availability of messages.

After all, think about how important your messages are to your business. In effect, they are your business. Your messages are your business transactions, your new orders, your customer address details, your stock levels and distribution information. Lose your messages and you lose everything.

With the latest SSD technology inside the MQ Appliance you are calling on Flash to save your business – and with the MQ Appliance M2001, Flash saves the day again.

 

[Flash Gordon image title image above is from  http://orig07.deviantart.net/fc1d/f/2012/163/5/d/flash_gordon_facebook_cover_by_audrey41lorgeoux-d538dgo.jpg]