Sun Microsystems Inc and Sonic Software Corp announced outstanding performance results achieved when Sonic Software tested SonicMQ running on Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) for AMD Opteron processor-based systems. The message tests achieved throughput volume of 94,000 messages per second, confirming the Sonic solution running on Sun is seven to 15 times faster than IBM WebSphereMQ (formerly MQSeries) running on Intel-based hardware.

SonicMQ running on the Solaris 10 OS can enable organizations to significantly increase the scalability and reduce the latency of their enterprise messaging systems. These capabilities are especially critical in the financial services industry where market data volumes have increased dramatically, and automated program trading has made latency a competitive business factor. An enterprise messaging solution built on SonicMQ running on Solaris 10 can help firms more efficiently manage their data load. Further, the patent-pending Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture (CAA) provides firms with fully software-based messaging fault-tolerance, reducing failover from minutes to seconds and eliminating potentially costly transaction failures.

The results of Sonic's tests represent unprecedented performance and scalability for SonicMQ, and demonstrate the continued strength of Sonic Software technology on Sun solutions. As the foundation for Sonic's industry- leading enterprise service bus, Sonic ESB, the tests indicate performance improvements that will help make service-oriented architecture (SOA) a viable option for applications where performance is critical, such as in financial services.

Sonic Software is one of several key independent software vendors (ISVs) that have announced support for their applications on the Solaris OS on x86 systems, demonstrating the continued growth within the Solaris for x86 ecosystem and choice of low-cost solutions. The reliability and speed of Solaris running on Sun Fire systems makes it an ideal choice for companies tasked with high-throughput processing, such as financial institutions, telecom providers, and call centers.

Key Findings

Sonic conducted performance tests running SonicMQ on two Sun Fire(TM) V40z servers with 2 AMD Opteron processors running Sun Solaris 10 vs. WebSphereMQ running on a 4-way 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon machine running Windows 2003. The Sun solution showed strong performance in CPU, networking and storage, demonstrating the best performance of all environments tested, including those from IBM and HP.

In a publish-subscribe (pub/sub), non-persistent, non-durable configuration using 100 byte messages with auto acknowledgment, tests showed dramatically higher throughput for SonicMQ (sender and receiver paired per topic).

In a point to point, persistent configuration using 100 byte messages with auto acknowledgment, tests show superior scalability for SonicMQ running on Solaris (sender and receiver paired per queue).

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com/.