MQSeries.net :: View topic - how to duplicate messages between Queue Managers

BBM · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 3:38 am Post subject:

Hi,

I have been asked to submit a proposal on how we can provide effective MQ failover between sites on W2K platforms.

The problem I've got is that MQ is already clustered on a SAN in London using MSCS. The disaster recovery site is located in Europe and is not covered by the SAN. So real time mirroring between them is not possible. The ideal solution to set up a cluster spanning the two sites with a common disk but the sites are too far apart to allow this to work unfortunately.

The queue manager in question consolidates messages from over 60 applications into one receiving application, some of which have the ability to replay messages some, unfortunately do not.

In a disaster scenario where the London queue manager is destroyed along with its disks they would like to fail over to the European queue manager.

I have raised the concept of publish/subscribe with the live and backup queue managers being subscribers but have pointed out that transactionality would be lost. The business have asked if some form of log-shipping is possible to periodically copy logs across - I have told them that at best this would be a heath robinson solution.

Does anyone know of any way to duplicate messages out to another queue manager in real time using the MQ infrastructure alone? i.e. no application changes? I'm pretty sure there is no way to do this, as doing so would violate the once only delivery rule, unless a product like message broker was introduced - which they will not do.

My view is that the applications that do not have the ability to replay messages should be re-coded so that they can - this sort of functionality is not the responsibility of MQ, if the data is that critical they should be able to replay it.

Any suggestions as usual gratefully received.