CS-QMAN

Application Areas:

CS-QMAN is a software infrastructure solution to maintain persistent message queues on HP NonStop servers, send queue messages directly to Pathway servers or even send and receive to/from remote databases.

Product Features:

• Unlimited number of queues
• Large message sizes supported (30k, larger size in future releases)
• Asynchronous operation
• Transfer Queue Manager compatible
• Includes simple Web based monitoring (iTP Webserver required)
• Talks to any ODBC compliant database for remote queues
• Local queue data kept in SQL/MP table
• TMF integration

Product Information:

Many applications require some sort of asynchronous, persistent message queuing. Messages stored in a queue must be processed in first in first out sequence. For these kinds of tasks a generic product is desirable: CS-QMAN. CS-QMAN runs on HP NonStop servers and provides named message queues stored in a single SQL table. Messages can be stored in a queue either by sending a message to the CS-QMAN entry manager process or by directly calling a CS-QMAN API function.
To forward stored messages to the processing application, the user can either send a message to the CS-QMAN wait manager process to get notification about a new entry or the CS-QMAN queue forwarder process can be configured to directly deliver the message to a corresponding Pathway server thus eliminating additional message flows.
Using the entry manager/wait manager model, CS-QMAN can immediately replace existing Queue Manager instances. CS-QMAN supports larger message sizes (up to 30k per message, even larger message sizes is planned for future releases of the product) and comes with a simple Web based monitoring application (iTP Webserver required).
Besides the monitoring application, CS-QMAN does not need or use any OSS functionality; everything runs in the Guardian environment.

Performance

For best performance, CS-QMAN is implemented in C/C++. Measurements have shown that the overhead of using a SQL/MP table instead of Enscribe files is very small. Overall performance should not be significantly worse than that of existing Queue Managers.

Remote Queues

CS-QMAN supports remote queues, i.e. queues residing on a different platform. The only requirement for such a platform is the availability of an ODBC compliant database. Using an ODBC gateway on a Windows platform, CS-QMAN can then directly read and write from and to queues stored on the remote system.

TMF Integration

CS-QMAN is completely compliant with TMF. All tables are TMF enabled; the queue forwarder will optionally start TMF transactions before sending a queue entry to a Pathway server.

Configuration, Management and Monitoring

CS-QMAN uses a SQL table for storing configuration information. This makes using the product in a data replication enabled environment with RDF, Shadowbase or similar products easier. Configuration information can automatically be replicated using any of those tools.
CS-QMAN comes with a simple Web based monitoring tool. For each queue the tool shows the number of messages in the queue, the average and maximum time a message spent in the queue and the number of queue entries processed in a given interval. If the number of queues to monitor is large (> 200), filters can be supplied to limit the number of queues shown on one screen.