In the Blogs

Wall Street needed fast, reliable applications that grew easily. Instead of adding more, bigger servers, they used Gigaspaces to bundle whole server clusters into discrete "processing units" that can be cloned to add capacity. In addition to being faster and scaling better, these units don't care whether they're in a private data center or a cloud.

"The main value proposition of cloud computing is better economics, that it’s cheaper to rent hardware, software platforms and applications (via a per-usage or subscription model) than it is to buy, build and maintain them in the corporate data center. But if we expect that cloud computing is here to stay –- and not just a passing fad –- it must be feasible for the cloud providers themselves. So how do they do it?" Read this blog by Geva Perry, CMO at GigaSpaces, about Cloud Computing.

First of all the introductory but well thought out talk by Nati Shalom of GigaSpaces on Cloud computing. There was informative eye candy on his slides and his talk brought to the fore-front of my consciousness the fact that capacity planning and scalability are thorny issues in general. I will be investigating the GigaSpaces stack, as before now it has been on my radar but hasn't been high priority enough.

GigaSpaces Nati Shalom's session was notable in that he discussed that business drivers behind the need of scalable systems: the number of financial transactions, data, and users is constantly growing. Further, the number of traffice spikes (overload situations that can bring down your business is growing). The challenge is to scale up cost-effectively while not sacrificing reliability and performance. Over-provisioning is one expensive way of catering for peak traffic, but has lead to average industry server utilization rates of 15-20%.

Cory Foy writes about his experience with GigaSpaces and Hibernate. As he says: "...thanks to Gigaspaces for designing a product where I can build my classes and business logic without having to shove bunches of your code and objects in it."

Rickard Öberg from Jayway writes about the Qi4j development framework and mentions a successful integration with GigaSpaces

Clara Ko from JavaPulse write about her research of SBA and the importance of linear scalability. Clara covers the latest GigaSpaces' white paper "Scaling Spring in 4 Easy Steps" showing the way to implement Space Based Architecture.

Most of RDBMS meets the problem with such Single Point of Failure and Bottleneck when massive IO accesses to DB are done.
In some cases, large data to be updated in a bulk manner is required.
In GigaSpaces, Space is used as In-Memory Data Grid(IMDG). But in contrast to the limitation of the data capacity which most In-Memory DB products meet, Spaces can have unlimited data in the partitioned spaces.

In this blog, Geva Perry, CMO of GigaSpaces, identifies the crucial need to differentiate between cloud and utility computing. Geva states, "Utility computing relates to the business model in which application infrastructure resources - hardware and/or software - are delivered. While cloud computing relates to the way we design, build, deploy and run applications that operate in an a virtualized environment, sharing resources and boasting the ability to dynamically grow, shrink and self-heal."