In the Blogs

"This week I will be helping run a Bird of a Feather session at CloudConnect looking at, among other things, vendor lock in through PaaS. It’s an issue that is perhaps the biggest concern around the use of PaaS, the fear that customers will be locked into one vendor. I personally believe that lock-in is the biggest barrier to SaaS completely dominating the Cloud marketplace going forwards. In light of this it is interesting to hear that GigaSpaces is today announcing the release of its latest platform, aimed at providing silo-free architecture.

"Global thought leadership organizations Gartner, IDC, and Merrill Lynch, just to name a few, all concur that cloud technologies, which already constitute a more than $16bn dollar annual market, are only expected to grow and some even predict multiply tenfold by 2015.

"Uri Cohen, Gigaspaces XAP product Manager, dropped by to bring me up to speed on XAP 8. it appears that the company has done quite a bit of work to extend the product so that it can offer a virtual application environment that will support physical systems, virtual systems and cloud-based systems using the same tools, the same APIs and with little problems for Gigaspace XAP users.

What Gigaspaces has to say about XAP 8

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"GigaSpaces releases it first beta for the new upcoming XAP 8.0. The new version includes new APIs support for XAP data grid, such as Document API, JPA API and extended support for JDBC.

On the management side XAP 8.0 adds new build in alerts mechanism and improved Web based management UI. Finally, as always an improved performance is one of the nice addition of this upcoming version"...

"If the definition of the term 'latency' is the overhead of the underlying infrastructure, and the definition of the term zero is that it is a number that is not necessarily zero, then indeed, we can conclude that the impossible goal of zero latency has been achieved.

 In fairness, Gigaspaces Shay Hassidim demonstrates how a memory based data store (IMDG) can wipe the floor with more traditional disc-based access systems when it comes to minimizing latency.

"Without the nitty gritty Gigaspaces offers all the backend system tiers in one convenient package. Message tier, application tier and database tier all tied together. They pull all the pieces together so companies don’t need to shop around for separate pieces of the same desired environmental outcome. All transactions are done in memory as are updates to the system, it’s all seamless...."

"I have been pretty busy in the last year engaged in a variety of industries where road map development and execution of next generation platforms and paradigm shifts were needed. Many of the more difficult challenges were solved by adopting a Space-Based Architecture (SBA) architecture pattern. This is a demonstrated pattern used to achieve near linear scalability of stateful, high-performance applications using the tuple spaces... I recommend you see a commercial implementation of this at Gigaspaces.

"GigaSpaces 7.1.1 will be released on June 16th, with the typical set of bug fixes, although it will include a significant new feature: memcached support.  Memcached is a distributed cache, implemented initially by LiveJournal. It is interacted with over TCP sockets, providing a set of sixteen commands - mostly variants of read/write operations, including some asynchronous write operations, which can be tangibly faster.."

"XAP 7.1 is the world's first middleware platform with built-in multi-tenancy. Not only does it significantly simplify development, but it also provides better isolation among multiple users and independent life cycle management for each tenant. The Elastic Data Grid offers one simple parameter defining the isolation level, allowing a variety of configurations such as allocating a dedicated machine per application, allowing multiple instances of the application to share the same resources while isolating others, or sharing everything among everyone.