A Tibco Hardware Appliance
May 5, 2008
San Francisco-based Tibco Software has unveiled a hardware appliance designed to be used with its Rendezvous messaging software, which is widely employed by trading desks. The new offering, Tibco Messaging Appliance, will provide ultra-low-latency messaging and is expected to be available by the fourth quarter.
"Every microsecond counts when it comes to accessing and disseminating mission-critical data," said Tibco chief engineer Denny Page. Tibco is responding to the needs of its exchange, brokerage and hedge fund customers, said Page, with the integrated hardware and software messaging solution, which combines Rendezvous' reliability with improved latency and throughput.
Rourke McNamara, director of product marketing at Tibco, said that the new platform will allow Rendezvous users to benefit from preprogrammed hardware speeds and the ability to upgrade and make adjustments without having to send their platforms back to the manufacturer. "It is field upgradeable," McNamara said. Users will be able to fix problems or add capabilities by downloading software updates from Tibco.
McNamara described the appliance, developed with networking equipment vendor Solace Systems of Ottawa, Canada, as more of a network switch than a general- purpose computer. Installation entails "a drop-in replacement for a server running Rendezvous software," he said. From in-house testing, "we have seen that one of these appliances is able to replace ten servers running Rendezvous," explained McNamara, adding that he expects customers to see notable savings on server space. The appliance can also be configured for use with other messaging platforms.
Larry Neumann, Solace SVP of marketing, said that with the new Tibco appliance, none of the customer applications that have been built on the Rendezvous messaging system over the past ten years will have to change. "With another vendor's product, you'd have to rewrite all those applications," he said.
