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Zero Unplanned Downtime Under Unpredictable Load

  • The GigaSpaces engine scaled easily and quickly proved itself under fire, [even] when some key back-office systems were temporarily unavailable.”
  • Tim Franklin, Chief Architect, Virgin Mobile


In this page: The Challenge | GigaSpaces XAP Delivers | How GigaSpaces XAP Does It | GigaSpaces XAP Track Record

The Challenge

Mission-critical applications are almost always backed up by solid high availability systems. Many data center vendors promise high reliability and availability, but this promise is limited because it only refers to each vendors’ specific product. Your servers may be very reliable, and your application server and database may be clustered, but this only ensures that each of these individual components won’t fail. Nobody can guarantee the availability of your entire application. Case in point – what happens when there’s a huge unexpected peak load? Your high-end servers won’t fail, but there won’t be enough of them to meet the load. As for the middleware, it will fail, and revert to backup, and then the backup will fail too. What is needed is a high availability solution that sees the full picture – deployment, application server, database, messaging – and guarantees availability across the board.

 

GigaSpaces XAP Delivers

GigaSpaces XAP powers mission critical applications at large enterprises like Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile and Societé General, which face extremely high, fluctuating loads. GigaSpaces’ Fortune 100 customers trust XAP to deliver zero unplanned downtime, because it takes responsibility for the entire application and all its middleware, and because it can deal with extreme loads and unpredictable scenarios, keeping applications alive no matter what. XAP not only prevents downtime, but also guarantees performance with no slowdowns. It also helps minimize planned downtime, by automating recovery and redeployment when maintenance occurs.

Benefit Cost Savings

Save the business costs of downtime:

  • Cost of each downtime event estimated at $500K-$1000K by 25% of companies (Forrester survey)
  • Total cost of downtime in 2009 estimated at $400 billion, an average of $8,000 per server per year (IDC)

 
  • Revenue losses
  • Reduced productivity
  • Damaged reputation
  • Financial performance (stock price, credit rating)

 
No need to invest in spare capacity to prepare for high loads – with XAP , applications can scale up dynamically on any available hardware in the event of high loads. Instead of keeping hardware on standby for the busiest day of the year, you can balance loads across the entire enterprise.
  • Reduced capital expenditure
  • Reduced maintenance and data center costs
  • Reduced operations overhead

 
Prevent slowdowns – XAP doesn’t only guarantee high availability, it also ensures your application always achieves the minimal response time defined in your service level agreements. When peak loads occur, XAP will provision enough resources to allow your application to continue meeting its service levels – ensuring your users don’t feel a thing.
  • More online purchases
  • More advertising revenue
  • Higher conversion
  • Increased user satisfaction

 

Want more details about the financial benefits to your organization?

Let us know, and a GigaSpaces expert will be in touch to help you quantify the benefits of zero downtime.

 

How GigaSpaces XAP Does It

  • Single Platform – availability for your entire application right out of the box
  • Most enterprise applications rely on numerous pieces of middleware. GigaSpaces XAP unites all these different parts into one platform, providing all the middleware functions in-memory, in-process, including data, messaging, and processing for software services, with one unified clustering model. This allows XAP to guarantee availability for your entire application – not just for a specific layer or component. XAP’s high availability comes right out of the box, with no need for special skills or complex configuration. XAP’s automated deployment allows it to re-deploy your application automatically in seconds, improving time to recovery, a crucial element in any availability strategy. XAP also has less moving parts than any traditional setup, making it much easier to guarantee uptime and prevent single points of failure.
  • Always On – reacts to high loads in real time and scales dynamically on any available hardware
  • GigaSpaces XAP keeps applications alive by reacting to loads in real time, and automatically spreading the load across additional machines, to ensure applications don’t exhaust their resources. This is made possible by XAP’s automated deployment framework, which constantly monitors your service levels and provisions additional hardware to ensure that they are always met. Although XAP stores data in-memory, it is just as reliable as a database – and much more highly available, because it can recover from failure automatically and restore all backups within seconds.

 

Learn more about GigaSpaces XAP…

 

GigaSpaces XAP Track Record

GigaSpaces XAP has a long history of keeping applications alive, even in the most extreme peak load scenarios.

  • Virgin Mobile – Virgin Mobile is an international Mobile Virtual Network Operator. Before GigaSpaces, a back-end failure of its central order management system led to a loss of web site availability and a loss of revenue. The company selected XAP to accommodate unpredictable changes in demand and maintain continuous availability. Tim Franklin, former Chief Architect, reported that "Performance testing went well, but even our high expectations were blown away" when, 10 months after the launch, virginmobile.co.uk experienced a threefold increase in incoming orders and XAP "scaled easily and quickly proved itself under fire.” Despite a restart of the legacy MRP/ERP system, XAP kept the application alive and ensured that every pending order was processed. XAP has since been rolled out across Virgin Mobile UK, and the company sees it as "a key element in our ongoing strategy." Read the full case study …
  • Cipheroptics – Cipheroptics offers security appliances that provide encrypted data flows for applications and networks, in sensitive industries such as finance, healthcare, and utilities, where there are stringent regulations regarding the integrity and safety of customer data. Needless to say its products are “highly available, always on, always ready.” Cipheroptics has selected GigaSpaces XAP as a foundation for a new generation of its appliances, to ensure even better resilience and fault tolerance, especially when multiple Cipheroptics units are used. Cipheroptics sees GigaSpaces as a strategic partner in its efforts to maintain security and integrity of customer data around the world.

All customers

 

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