GigaSpaces XAP: A Scale-out Application Server

Right out of the box, GigaSpaces XAP delivers:

• Dynamic processing power you can count on to meet peak loads and unpredictable spikes in demand.  Learn more
• Guaranteed performance and high availability under any processing load. Learn more
• Cost-effective, on-demand scalability for clouds and grids. Learn more
  

From a business manager's perspective, a rapid increase in demand for services or applications is a great measure of success, and something we all hope to achieve. From a technology perspective, however, unpredictable spikes and exponential growth in demand can wreak havoc with a system's reliability and availability. In the end, "success" can come at a high cost in terms of lost revenues, tarnished brands, and a lot of unhappy customers.

GigaSpaces XAP provides the predictable scalability required to meet unpredictable demand for large-scale Web applications and other applications with fluctuating loads. How?

XAP allows your application to achieve linear scalability without significant changes to your code or existing infrastructure. Because the application is self contained and running on a single server, deployment is just as easy across ten thousand machines as it is across ten machines.

• XAP lets your application scale on demand, so you can avoid expensive over-provisioning and make sure your systems are ready to support business growth.
• XAP helps guarantee that you'll meet your service level agreements (like response times) even during unpredictable peak loads because data processing is managed in-memory.
• XAP's pure in-memory stack helps guarantee 24/7 reliability and fault tolerance without compromising performance and scalability, or risking data loss.

Learn more 

GigaSpaces XAP for Large-Scale Web Applications
GigaSpaces XAP product information
Case Study (Telecom): Virgin Mobile
Blog: How I Ported an Online Gaming Application from (Not-So-) Good-Old-JEE to GigaSpaces in Only 4 Days

What happens when a typical application is pushed to process more data, serve more clients, and provide more services, and it is expected to do it all reliably and in less time than before? It usually falls far short of expectations or requires a massive re-investment in infrastructure and systems. Applications powered by GigaSpaces XAP never fall short, because they deliver guaranteed real-time information processing and extreme transaction processing (XTP) performance under any processing load. How?

• XAP co-locates the data with the business logic on a single server and manages data and messaging in-memory, in-process. This approach eliminates the bottlenecks, latency, and complexity associated with tier-based middleware that has many "moving parts" and requires multiple network hops.
• XAP is built to handle distributed data with sub-millisecond latency, helping guarantee that you'll meet your service level agreements (specifically low latency and high throughput) even during unpredictable throughput loads.
• XAP guarantees continuous high availability (sub-second hot failover and no data loss) without compromising latency or throughput, because it writes to the database in the background.

Learn more 

GigaSpaces XAP for Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP)
GigaSpaces XAP for Real-Time Analytics
GigaSpaces XAP product information
Case Study (Financial Services): Monte Paschi Group

The main value proposition of cloud computing is that it allows organizations to leverage economies of scale-it's cheaper to rent hardware and software on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis than it is to buy, build, and maintain mega-systems in the corporate data center. This is especially true when the alternative is costly over-provisioning in order to accommodate unpredictable growth rates and surges in processing demand.

GigaSpaces XAP magnifies the benefits of cloud computing by adding scalability, reliability, and high performance to applications using the cloud, including public clouds like Amazon EC2, on-premise virtualized environments, and hybrid environments that combine corporate data centers with external clouds. How?

• XAP fully exploits the usage-based pricing model offered by public clouds by allowing applications to grow and shrink on-demand, so you only pay for the infrastructure you need, for as long as you need it.
• XAP enables applications to scale linearly, giving you more processing power at lower cost. If one server can process 500 transactions per second, two servers can process 1,000, ten servers can process 5,000, and so on.
• XAP is self-healing and "always-on." If there is a failure in the cloud, the application instantly fails-over with no data loss.
• XAP minimizes latency and maximizes throughput to ensure high application performance in the cloud.
• XAP supports common Java and .Net development frameworks including Spring, Spring .Net, Mule, and Java EE, allowing developers to leverage their existing skill sets to improve performance for existing applications, and simplify future application development and planning to get new products and services to market faster.
• XAP provides "cloud portability," allowing you to move applications from one type of cloud to another without changes to the code.

  Learn more
  
  The GigaSpaces Cloud Framework
  Easily Scale Your Apps on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  Blog: GigaSpaces and the Economics of Cloud Computing