Hi Daniel
Thanks for the review and for the advice.
You touched on some important points that i
wanted to clarify.
1. The IT landscape is changing - Network
bandwidth is growing, Memory becomes available
at greater capacity and lower cost,and new
intel multicore chips bring the power of
mainframe to commodity hardware and cloud and
virtualization make it possible to utilize IT
resources in an elastic manner based on real
demand.
2. Most of the existing applications in IT
where not designed to take advantage of those
new capabilities (Simply since they didn't
exist) resulting in a fairly low utilization of
those resources.
This is a huge transition that is even bigger
the the internet wave and happen once every
decade. Like the internet it is forcing many
organization to re-structure their current IT
environment.
Our approach with XAP is not to force that
change but to make the transition of those that
already decided to take that path smoother by:
- Enable smooth migration and minimize lock-in
through the support of standard APIs and
integrating with existing platforms
API ? SQL, JMS, JDBC, JPA, ?
Platforms: Spring, Apache, TomCat, Jetty, Mule
- Reduced scaling complexity by providing a
fully automated middleware implementation that
can handle failure, scaling and re-sizing
without human intervention.
On the multicore side - the thing that makes
multicore programming hard the fact that you
need to manage state in a lock-free model which
often force complete re-write. We provide
implementation of existing API's in a lock-free
model that enables application to get better
utilization of mutlicore without re-writing
their entire application to a different model.
So the bottom line of my response that
sometimes change is inevitable. GigaSpaces is
not trying to force that change but to make the
transition of those that already decided to
take that path smoother.
Anyway since this is not the right place for a
lengthy response (and its already too long:)) I
would like to suggest that you will join me
next week to a webinar on that topic where i
will also discuss how a leading wall street
firm were able to plug-in XAP to their
application running on Tomcat and automate some
of the hardest downtime and scaling procedures
with their disaster recovery site as well as
gain better performance and scaling.
http://www.gigaspaces.com/node/1572
Thanks again for the report and advice
Nati S
GigaSpaces CTO & Founder
Developing applications that can take best advantage of multiple processors or cores has been quite a challenge for most developers. This can be attributed to several things including the developer’s lack of experience with architectures designed for parallel execution. This typically means that commercial applications are not set up to make best use of today’s multi-core systems, local clusters of systems or cloud offerings allowing an application to scale by requesting additional resources as needed. This is exactly the problem set that Gigaspaces has targeted. The company recently launched a new version, 7.1, of its XAP Application Platform.
What Gigaspaces has to say about XAP 7.1
GigaSpaces announces the release of eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), version 7.1, which automatically implements dynamic scalability and multi-tenancy, based on an organization’s individual business requirements. This significantly simplifies development, deployment and operations while enabling enterprises to maximize utilization of modern IT resources with no change to the way they do business.
XAP eases development, deployment, and operations with its new API for the Elastic Data Grid. Users input their business requirements, and XAP deploys and configures the data grid cluster automatically, saving substantial effort and cost involved in sizing, hardware provisioning, and configuring distributed middleware.
GigaSpaces XAP 7.1 is certified for use with Cisco UCS, which can form a cluster that reaches a memory capacity of several terabytes with massive computing power. This combination offers a full, scalable stack – from the hardware to the application level – enabling deployment in one API call for even the largest in-memory operations. New benchmarks will be released shortly.
Additional Features in XAP 7.1
- Extended in-memory querying capabilities – brings the data grid closer to the querying capabilities of traditional databases
- Real-time troubleshooting – administrators can automatically gather dumps and logs from a large number of machines when any suspicious event occurs or get logs and dumps from an entire distributed system at the click of a button
- First milestone of web-based dashboard – version 7.1 gets closer to making XAP’s full management and monitoring GUI accessible using a regular web browser
Snapshot analysis
The golden rules of IT start with the rule number 1 “If it is not broken, don’t fix it.” Most suppliers of application frameworks, such as Gigaspaces XAP 7.1, are hoping to entice developers to break that rule and re-architect current workloads to better use parallel approaches for performance and/or scalability. If one steps back and considers today’s environment, this is a hope that is unlikely to be realized.
The truth of the matter is that organizations seldom go back and “fix” something that’s working. That’s in the best of times. No, they focus their attention on keeping current systems running, making enhancements to those systems, and trying to keep up with their organizations’ never ending need for new IT-based solutions.
This means that tools, such as XAP 7.1, often are considered only when the organization is adding something new to its portfolio. This also means that an organization’s portfolio of workloads is a layer cake of different application architectures, tools and platforms.
Since there are many different application frameworks available today and Platform as a Service (PaaS) suppliers are flogging their own, Gigaspaces is likely to face a bit of a uphill battle to gain developers’ attention and interest. Getting them to go further and actually decide upon their platform rather than one offered by others is the next step.
Unasked for shoot from the hip advice
Having good technology is obviously the gate fee, the fee that allows a supplier to take part in the game. Marketing that technology is the next step. Gigaspace, you need to focus on getting the word out about your tool set, the problems it can address better than offerings from any other supplier and why a developer should chose you. It would also be wise to persuade major services providers to include XAP in their portfolio of tools.
Your technology looks good. The feature set looks useful. Getting people to look at you and your product is next.
