During a recent family to trip to Orlando, it made me realize how lucky the crew of the Enterprise was to travel at warp speed and the use of transporters to get around, getting from point A to point B in almost no time. Compared to banking just a decade ago, the current trends in low level latency middleware environments has the same objectives.
In today’s technological world, especially in business, the importance of leveraging technology to drive intra-day risk management systems has never been higher. Banks are leveraging the latest technologies to squeeze out every bit of latency.
To align the business with the technology, there needs to be two levels of middleware: A lower level of communication middleware to handle lower level messaging and a high level of middleware responsible for handling application and data integration technology. A high quality level of middleware needs to be flexible enough to accommodate all levels of requirements.
What are the needs that this level of middleware has to respond to?
- Changes in scale and liquidity in the market
- Acquisitions
- Changes in regulatory requirements
- Data security
- Data center consolidation
- Changes in technology
- Changes in workload
- Application Performance Monitoring
One type of middleware that is introduced to address these issues is appliance based technologies. For example, using these solutions for content-based routing, message transformation, protocol switching and low latency messaging. Appliances allow for more application mobility and elasticity as the demand scales up and down. They make it easier to move applications and objects from one place to another.
With all of these solutions now introduced to your system, it is imperative middleware management be applied efficiently and effectively.
It is critical that a monitor be in place to support business growth leveraging a high-speed caching tier to improve overall efficiency within the private cloud environment and reduce the risk when adding environmental load, providing much more stability to the environment. To manage the high number of technologies, you need a consistent way to monitor them.
As the trend towards zero latency continues, the current techniques will need to be extended to improve self-service, to extend monitoring into the integration middleware stack, to achieve more from Complex Event Processing for enhanced decision support, and to use Case-Based Reasoning for the prediction of past experiences based on real-time data .
Charley Rich is VP Product Management and Marketing at Nastel Technologies.