The Met Office implements Nexor messaging system to ensure delivery of time-critical weather information

Project FROST delivers increased performance and resilience for the exchange of meteorological data

Nottingham, UK, 11 July 2002 – Nexor, a leading provider of high-tolerance messaging and directory solutions, is working with Hewlett Packard (HP) and Corobor to provide the Met Office with a dual message switch solution that will enable the exchange of meteorological data worldwide and provide organisations with timely and accurate weather reports.

The Met Office plays a pivotal role in the gathering and communication of information regarding the world’s weather conditions and is relied upon by governments, military, airlines and many other industries that require timely and accurate weather reports. The project, named FROST, will replace the Met Office’s existing messaging infrastructure, TROPICS, with a system that delivers increased performance and resilience for time-critical messaging services.

HP was awarded the contract and turned to Nexor for the message switch, based on its reputation for providing messaging solutions to defence, government, finance and commercial organisations across the globe. Following stringent performance testing, Nexor Mailer was selected for its ability to switch very large volumes of X.400 and SMTP-based messages in a narrow time band, its ability to be integrated with third-party products and its high level of resilience.

'Nexor Mailer has been proven in thousands of installations worldwide. It was designed for environments like the Met Office, where the sending and receiving of a message is time-critical and where resilience and high performance are absolutely essential,' explains Steve Kingan, CEO Nexor.

The FROST system is based on a port of Nexor Mailer to HP's latest HP-UX 11 operating system and will run on high-performance HP servers in a hot-standby configuration. Nexor Mailer will be integrated with Corobor's Messir-Comm weather switching product to provide a seamless solution. This meets the needs of the Met Office for a future-proof messaging platform that integrates with management interfaces and handles the significant increase in forecasted traffic.

'Every day, 10 million individual pieces of data are used by our weather-forecasting models, so we need a robust message handling system. The Met Office looks forward to a successful implementation and ongoing working relationship with Nexor and other contributing suppliers,' adds Robert Stephens, IT Project Manager at the Met Office.

'Acting as the prime contractor, HP has sought to reduce the risk to the Met Office of implementing FROST by taking total responsibility for the building and installation of the solution. Strong HP project management has enabled very positive results to date and we are very pleased with the support from our partners Nexor and Corobor,' comments Wyn Richards, HP Met Office Account Manager.

For further information, please info [at] nexor [dot] com (subject: Nexor%20Press%20Release) (contact Wendy Draper).