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IBM MQ Appliance M2004 is available

By Alex Chatt posted 07/14/26 10:17 AM

The IBM MQ Appliance M2004 has now been announced, which is the latest generation of IBM’s appliance-based offering of IBM MQ. The M2004 comes with several upgrades over its predecessor, the M2003, including CPU power, increased memory bandwidth and efficiency, and 4x 100Gb Ethernet ports. Customers who upgrade their M2002 appliances, which go out of support next year, should notice considerable improvements in the processing power of the M2004.

The M2004 appliance is designed with:

Simple setup and configuration
Optimised performance
Resiliency with built-in support for high-availability and disaster recovery
Cost efficiency and simplified maintenance
Built-in security features, including disk encryption, TLS, and IBM MQ Advanced Message Security (AMS)

It is available with two capacity modes, as per previous generations. The full appliance capacity is available to the M2004A, and the M2004B is available with a reduced CPU and disk quota for customers who do not require the full hardware capability. The M2004B has 8 cores enabled, and a software upgrade to enable the full capacity of the appliance remains an option to support increased workloads over time.

Hardware

A table that compares the specification of the M2002, M2003 and M2004 hardware models is below.

M2004 (new model)	M2003 (previous model)	M2002 (older model)
Two 16-core 2.80 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6526Y processors (8 cores active in B model), 2.90 GHz, Hyperthreading enabled.	2 x 16-core 2.90GHz processors (8 cores for B model)	2 x 12-core 2.60 GHz processors (6 cores for B model)
256 GB, Sixteen 6400 MHz DDR5 DIMM	256 GB RAM, 3200 MHz DDR4 DIMMs	192 GB RAM, 2666 MHz DDR4 DIMMs
2 x 1Gb management Ethernet ports	2 x 1Gb management Ethernet ports	2 x 1Gb management Ethernet ports
8 x 1 Gb Ethernet ports	8 x 1Gb Ethernet ports	8 x 1Gb Ethernet ports
4 x 10 Gb Ethernet ports	4 x 10Gb Ethernet ports	6 x 10Gb Ethernet ports
2 x 40 Gb Ethernet ports	4 x 40Gb Ethernet ports	4 x 40Gb Ethernet ports
4 x 100 Gb Ethernet ports	2 x 100Gb Ethernet ports	-
4 x 3.2 TB NVMe SSDs under hardware controlled mirrored RAID (6 TB effective, 3 TB effective B model)	4 x 3.2 TB NVMe SSDs, RAID 10 (6 TB effective, 3 TB effective for B model)	4 x 3.2 TB SAS SSDs, RAID 10 (6 TB effective, 3 TB effective for B model)

Firmware

The M2004 appliance comes with IBM MQ 10.0 long-term support (LTS) firmware pre-installed, which is the minimum firmware version that it supports. The 10.0 firmware includes many MQ family enhancements that are available on other platforms.

For customers who currently use the 9.4 long-term support release, the 10.0 firmware includes several other enhancements that have been developed over the past couple of years through MQ’s continuous delivery releases. Notable enhancements in the 10.0 firmware include:

Ability to encrypt HA and DR traffic with TLS
Secure HA Heartbeat links
OpenTelemetry tracing service on the MQ Appliance
Enhancments to the IBM MQ Console
Quantum safe TLS and positive authority events

For more information about IBM MQ 10.0 see the official documentation (links below), and Ian Harwood’s blog post at https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/ian-harwood1/2026/06/11/mq100ga

10.0 support for older hardware models

The 10.0 firmware is available for both the new M2004 appliance, and the previous M2003 appliance. The M2004 announcement letter confirms this and is avaliable here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/announcements/mq-appliance-m2004-offers-enhanced-processing-performance-next-generation-memory-architecture-expanded-100-gb-network-connectivity?region=US

The 10.0 firmware will not support the older M2002 hardware model, which has an end of support date of September 30, 2027. The 9.4 long-term support (LTS) and 9.4.5 continuous delivery (CD) firmware releases will be supported on the M2002 hardware until that date to ensure that a supported firmware remains available.

While you can upgrade from MQ 9.4 LTS or CD to MQ 10 on the M2003, you can't downgrade from MQ 10 to an earlier release. To go back from MQ 10 to MQ 9.4 on the M2003, you need to reinitialise the appliance with the ealier level of firmware. Therefore, make sure that you take a backup of the appliance before upgrading to MQ 10.