Large-Scale Web Applications

Dynamic, cost-effective scalability for unpredictable processing loads

Planning for future growth is a critical success factor for any large-scale Web application, but multi-dimensional changes in processing demand make scaling progressively more difficult and expensive as the application grows. Underestimating growth increases the risk of downtime and unacceptable latency levels, while overestimating future demand can translate to time and money wasted on unnecessary machines. To ensure efficiency and reliability, Web applications must be able to:

• Scale up economically, without reducing data affinity or increasing latency to unacceptable levels.
• Meet the requirements of high-throughput stateful applications, including Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications.
• Ensure high availability.

GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) enables high-volume, high-throughput Web applications to scale-out across a farm of commodity hardware systems that are low-cost, fast, and easy to add. Similar to the powerful systems built by Google, MySpace, and eBay, GigaSpaces XAP provides a lightweight infrastructure that makes extensive use of memory, co-llocates the business logic and the data, and works in a highly parallel fashion across hundreds of machines.
Right out of the box, XAP provides the scalability and performance required to power all kinds of large-scale Web applications, including:

• Web 2.0, Software as a Service (Saas), and eCommerce across industries
• Trading applications in the Financial Services industry
• E-commerce, provisioning and order management systems in the telecommunications industry
• Online reservations sytems in the Travel industry
• High-volume portals in Government organizations
• Online gaming in the Entertainment industry

Based on a Space-Based Architecture, XAP creates self-sufficient processing units that can scale-out across many cost-effective computers, allowing organizations to leverage investments in current systems while benefiting from the higher utilization and flexibility afforded by SOA, Grid computing, and other highly distributed architectures. It is easy to deploy one or more processing units on as many machines as required-with one click. Deployment doesn't become even a bit more complex when scaling from ten machines to ten thousand.

GigaSpaces XAP enables large-scale Web applications that:

• Deliver the lowest possible latency by accessing and processing data and events locally and in-memory
• Scale-out without increasing complexity by adding more self-sufficient processing units (Share-Nothing Architecture)
• Scale the data and the processing at the same time through parallel querying and in-memory data caching and partitioning ("sharding")
• Make it easy to guarantee the reliability of each processing unit's data

Other Technology Solutions from GigaSpaces:

Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP)
Real-Time Analytics
High-Performance SOA