The growing importance of conducting business 24x7x365 and the increasing need for real-time operations are driving the demand for high availability enterprise systems. To maximize revenue and profitability through continuous business processing, organizations need to architect systems that connect their enterprise and beyond, continuously servicing their business partners and customers. Even during scheduled systems downtime it is necessary that other systems, departments, business units, and partners can continue working. In the event of a system crash, it is extremely important that there is no loss of data.

Messaging middleware allows distributed applications to communicate with each other, helping IT organizations solve a variety of business problems such as:

To provide higher levels of availability for their messaging infrastructure, companies have been spending significant time and resources coding and assembling elaborate solutions such as duplicate message systems, or utilizing expensive RAID and SAN networks. There is a lack of trust in the middleware due to problems caused by systems failure - specifically, trapped messages on the failed server, duplicate messages sent and received, out-of-order messages and broken transactions. When minutes of downtime translate into millions in lost revenue, missed opportunities or regulatory fines, it is clear that a better solution is required.

Vytwo Software raises the bar for high availability and fault-tolerant messaging, reducing operational risk as well as the development time and administration complexity of high availability solutions. The patent-pending Vytwo Continuous Availability Architecture (CAA) addresses the problems caused by messaging system failure, so business applications continue to operate.

Enterprise messaging frameworks are designed to enable one or more applications to communicate despite a variety of obstacles. Common barriers include the requirement that both systems be running at the same time (synchronous communication), the need for multiple applications to receive the same message (multiple transmissions), the heterogeneity of most systems, and network failure.

Many enterprise architectures rely on message-oriented-middleware systems (MOMs) to channel messages between disparate systems. MOMs provide a common and reliable way for applications to create, exchange, and process messages without regard for the implementation details of the messaging client. Messages are sent to server destinations and domains rather than physical addresses. Messaging clients simply declare interest in a particular domain and destination, provide the proper security tokens to gain access to the domain in question, and then interact with the messaging server through that destination.

Conceptually, this is no different from the way that physical mail is delivered in real life. The sender of a message is responsible only for using the correct packaging, supplying an accurate address, and applying the appropriate postage. The postal service (in our case, a MOM system) handles all issues related to the secure and reliable delivery of the message regardless of any obstacles that present themselves (mechanical failures, bad weather, etc.).

In a MOM system, clients are decoupled from one another, allowing them to maintain optimum quality of service without actually having to be "online" every second of the day. After you've removed the requirement that applications be always available, maintenance and scalability are much easier to manage. Applications can be brought down, updated, or refreshed for routine maintenance at almost any time of day, without affecting quality of service.