When IBM MQ 9.3 was released last month, as discussed here, it was notable (and noted) that this was just for distributed platforms and that news of the mainframe and the appliance would follow.

Now, IBM has announced the new MQ Appliance, called M2003, with general availability on August 2, 2022.

In terms of what’s new, IBM says that it “brings together next-generation hardware and IBM MQ firmware, packed with the latest updates and designed to provide a more powerful appliance than its predecessor,” so presumably that means it has the MQ 9.3 functionality.

Like the previous releases, the IBM MQ Appliance M2003 is designed for the following:

• Simple setup
• Maximized performance
• Business resiliency
• Cost efficiency
• Data insights
• Help protects against threats

We will be joining their Webcast on August 11, 2022, to learn more: Data Availability and Integrity with the new IBM MQ Appliance, M2003.

Nastel products support this new version of the MQ Appliance.  For further information on Nastel’s dedicated support for the MQ Appliance click here.

UPDATE: Aug 17th

IBM has now released more information in this blog post.

They have confirmed that the appliance runs MQ 9.3 and so includes the following enhancements:

• Streaming queues for insight into the data flowing through MQ
• Encrypted file systems to protect IBM MQ data at rest
• Synchronous replication for disaster recovery (DR) between two appliances
• Simplified administration for high availability (HA) resource failures
• Retrieve HA and DR configuration settings using REST
• Process dead-letter queues by using a remote client DLQ handler

They’ve also provided more detail on the improved hardware:

• 2 x 16-core 2.90GHz processors (8 cores for B model)
• 256 GB RAM, 3200 MHz DDR4 DIMMs
• 2 x 1Gb management Ethernet ports
• 8 x 1Gb Ethernet ports
• 4 x 10Gb Ethernet ports
• 4 x 40Gb Ethernet ports
• 2 x 100Gb Ethernet ports
• 4 x 3.2 TB NVMe SSDs, RAID 10 (6 TB effective, 3 TB effective for B model)

As previously discussed here, Nastel especially welcomes the streaming queues functionality which can be utilized by Nastel XRay for transaction tracking and data analytics.