The focus in the design of the 29West messaging layer has been flexibility, application independence, network independence, and raw performance (both high message rates and low latency) with low overhead. We have been able to achieve these goals with remarkable success. In a demonstration at the Futures Industry Association Show in October of 2004, LBM delivered message rates of over 1,400,000 message/sec. In applications where LBM has replaced other leading messaging layers, many of our customers and evaluation accounts have been able to increase throughput by a factor of between 3 and 10 times the data rate they were able to achieve with the existing solution. Factors of 10 or more improvements in measured latency have also been seen. The most interesting numbers come from measuring performance in your application and network environment. There are many factors that can impact performance, so we encourage interested prospects to put LBM evaluation software to the test and see what gains we provide in your environment.

There are always tradeoffs to gain the very highest performance and 29West offers consulting and integration support for customers who are interested in taking a systems level view to their data flow and application design. LBM provides customers with the ability to truly manage message flow, exception handling and overall application design. This makes truly high performance applications easier to create and support in production.

Until the announcement of persistence in the 29west messaging family in September of 2006, applications that needed features like guaranteed messaging, durable subscriptions and late join support were forced to provide that logic in the application layer. With the announcement of support for these features in our Ultra Messaging™ for the Enterprise (UME) messaging solution, 29West is offering customers the ability to provide persistence at wire speeds. In keeping with the basic model of LBM, persistence is delivered without inserting an additional application (or disk write) directly into the main message data path, but we instead persist the data in parallel. This provides very significant performance gains and allows LBM to be leveraged in most any messaging application.

What gets left behind? We believe you lose no key functionality and gain some key performance and flexibility. Any truly new design will be different, and since LBM is a clearly new design, it may require some modest redesign of messaging applications built on legacy systems to make the best use of our support for multiple protocols, wide range of network addresses and other unique features. Most customers have found that simply porting an existing design over as is provides a dramatic performance improvement, but the best way to determine this is to use our evaluation model to see what gains you can expect with your applications running on your network