Below is a list of frequently asked questions about GigaSpaces and their answers. If you can't find the answers you are looking for, feel free to email us at info@gigaspaces.com. 

Benefits and Cost Savings

• How much can GigaSpaces XAP save me by improving hardware utilization?
• Two of the biggest factors affecting utilization are resource allocation and application performance. The more efficiently you allocate resources between applications, the less idle hardware you'll have lying around, and the higher your utilization will be. As for application performnace - if an application is running at sub-optimal performance, it is in fact utilizing too many resources (CPU, memory, data center facilities, etc). Boosting performance can mean running at the same speed using less resources, or in other words, improving utilization. For example, one GigaSpaces customer, eBay subsidiary Markplaats, is using GigaSpaces XAP to boost performance, allowing it to run the same loads with 95% less servers.
  
  
  GigaSpaces XAP dramatically improves utilization by addressing both factors - resource allocation and performance. XAP provides scalability on demand, meaning it can dynamically allocate idle resources to the applications that need them most. XAP is also proven to boost application performance - it powers the world’s fastest applications, such as trade processing at leading stock exchanges, and is able to bring the same extreme performance to any enterprise application. Applications running on XAP become faster and more efficient, allowing them to meet the same loads with less hardware – meaning you can consolidate servers and save costs. In fact, a benchmark performed by independent consultants proved that by boosting performance alone (without taking account XAP's efficient resource allocation), XAP can save at least 80% of hardware for a standard JEE application. Read more about improving utilization and saving hardware with XAP.
• How can linear scalability reduce my hardware costs?
• Software applications often need to scale up quickly to meet dramatically higher traffic or operation volumes. But as soon as an application needs to “scale out” across additional machines, scalability becomes expensive - there are diminishing returns from each additional machine, until at some point adding more machines actually decreases performance.
  
  
  With GigaSpaces XAP, you’ll need to purchase much less hardware in order to scale up, because XAP scales applications linearly, eliminating the diminishing returns. In order to quantify our customers' hardware savings as a result of linear scalability, we used a broadly-accepted theoretical model of software scalability. The model predicts that in common application scenarios, the hardware saving ranges between 15-90%. For example, in a database-centric web application which needs to scale up by 150%, scaling up with GigaSpaces XAP will save at least 45% of the additional hardware. To take another example, in a small-scale reliable messaging system which needs to scale up by 300%, GigaSpaces XAP will save at least 60% of additional hardware. Read more about saving hardware costs when scaling up with GigaSpaces XAP.
• How can you promise to be "always on" even under unpredictable peak loads?
• GigaSpaces XAP has a proven track record in ensuring high availability in extreme scenarios - it powers mission critical applications at large enterprises like Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile and Societe General, which face extremely high, fluctuating loads. GigaSpaces’ Fortune 100 customers trust XAP to deliver zero unplanned downtime, because unlike most vendors of high availability equipment, GigaSpaces provides a high availability solution that sees the full picture – deployment, application server, database, messaging – and guarantees availability across the board. Individual components might be highly available but they won't keep the application alive - even high-end servers or clustered databases won't do you any good if the loads exceed your expectations and exhaust the resources you have allocated. XAP is the only product that is scalable on-demand, so it directly and automatically responds to peak loads by scaling your application on any additional hardware, keeping it alive no matter what. XAP not only prevents downtime, but also guarantees performance with no slowdowns, and helps you minimize planned downtime, by automating recovery and redeployment when maintenance occurs. Read more about achieving zero unplanned downtime under unpredictable load with GigaSpaces XAP.
• Who are your customers and what kind of results are they getting?
• GigaSpaces customers include six of the world's top ten investment banks, world-leading exchanges, market data providers, hedge funds and retail banks, leading international and US telecommunications and mobile carriers, global ecommerce companies, five of the world's top online gaming companies, and leading Internet media organizations.

  See the results enjoyed by some of these leading players on our website in our case studies.

  You can also see what customers and partners are saying about us.

  Finally, contact sales@gigaspaces.com and we'll be happy to provide you with non-public reference materials and contacts.

Comparison to Product Categories and Other Vendors

• How is GigaSpaces XAP different from alternative application servers?
• GigaSpaces XAP is a high-end application server for distributed applications. It is the only application server that offers all of the following:
  • Single platform - providing data, messaging, processing, high availability and deployment.
  • High performance - used by the world's fastest applications for extreme throughput, response time and latency.
  • Scalable on-demand – unlimited, linear scalability, with the ability to grows and shrink distributed applications on-the-fly.
  • Always on – keeps applications alive under extreme, unpredictable load.
  • Open – supports open frameworks and standards, minimizes vendor lock-in and protects historic investments.

  Learn more about XAP's unique value proposition.

• Does XAP have better ROI than traditional application servers?
• A benchmark performed by GigaSpaces compared two implementations of an Order Management System application - one was built with WebLogic and Spring, and the other, using the same code, implemented with GigaSpaces and Spring. The results demonstrated that by running with GigaSpaces XAP total cost of ownership is significantly reduced due to the following:
  • Increased server throughput, which reduces the amount of servers and software licenses required to handle the same volumes
  • Shorter time-to-market of new products and services due to reduced deployment complexity, reduced testing and tuning cycles and decreased development complexity
  • Increased reliability through better testability and self-healing capabilities
  • Lower maintenance overhead through better manageability
  • Use a single platform for Java, .Net and C++
  • Use the same platform across various application types, including transactional, web, real time analytics, SOA and more.

  The benchmark shows that cost-savings grow exponentially as scaling requirements grow, due to the fact that JEE application servers cannot scale linearly.

  If you would like to receive more details on this benchmark please contact sales@gigaspaces.com.

• What if my application already uses a traditional application server?
  
• If your application currently uses a JEE application server, there are several approaches you can take with GigaSpaces XAP:
  
  
  • Integrate GigaSpaces XAP with your existing application server as an In-Memory Data Grid and/or distributed execution environment to reduce the load on your app server.
  • If you use an open source application server such as Tomcat (and other elements such as Spring and Hibernate) you can leverage GigaSpaces XAP to add reliability and scalability to the stack.
  • You can also completely replace your existing JEE app server with GigaSpaces. If your application uses Spring, or certain APIs (such as JMS or JDBC) this will involve minimal code changes. For more details, see the XAP migration portal.
• How and when did you become an alternative to application servers? (I thought you were a data grid vendor)
• From its inception, GigaSpaces' technology and set of products was all about offering a scalable application platform as an alternative to traditional approaches. Due to the high throughput and low latency capabilities of our product, initial adoption occurred from companies with the most extreme requirements, like Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile, Sempra Energy Trading, Nortel and others. While most organizations are always looking to improve their systems, they also want to protect their historic investments in technology and may not have the time, resources or finances available to make wholesale changes. As a result, they often choose to implement new technology components that would serve to compliment their existing architectures. In recent years, one of the most common components these companies looked to implement was data grid/distributed caching. Therefore, as a tactical solution to fill a void in the market place, GigaSpaces had added a data grid edition for those users seeking a solution to their performance challenges.

  Today, the market is changing. Extreme data and transaction processing is becoming a mainstream requirement for all kinds of applications, and a new breed of application platforms, like GigaSpaces XAP, addresses this need. Over the past several years, GigaSpaces has proved the maturity and innovation of its technology with hundreds of customers and mission-critical applications. It has also significantly enhanced its flagship product, the eXtreme Application Platform, and is now poised to bring these values to the mainstream market. With the disappearance of BEA as an independent platform player, and the emergence of new computing paradigms such as clouds and grids, GigaSpaces believe the market is ripe for a new generation of vendors and technologies.

• How is a distributed shared memory implementation of JavaSpaces relevant to application servers?
• It is true that one of the core capabilities of GigaSpaces XAP is the powerful space implementation. However, in the past few years we've continuously added capabilities and abstractions on top of it which resulted in supporting all application interaction styles which traditional application servers support, in addition to paradigms which aren't supported by the Java EE specifications, such as: distributed data-caching, parallel batch computations, complex event-driven processing, map-reduce and others. In addition the fact that all of the supported middleware capabilities (processing, data management, and asynchronous messaging) are all implemented on top of the same Space implementation adds the capabilities of single clustering model for all of these capabilities which reduces complexity and cost of ownership.
• How is XAP different from data grid/caching products like Oracle Coherence, Terracotta or IBM ObjectGrid?
• Let's start with how XAP is similar to these other offerings. XAP comes with a cutting edge In-Memory Data Grid that breaks up data sets into smaller units called partitions, and runs them in-memory on each server, providing faster data access and improved scalability. XAP runs backups of each data partition, with advanced failover and self-healing capabilities that provide near-100% uptime and reliability, even in the most demanding scenarios. XAP’s In-Memory Data Grid is an enterprise-grade solution, designed from the ground up to achieve consistency and reliability for highly transactional applications. Read more about GigaSpaces XAP's leading In-Memory Data Grid solution.
  
  
  But in GigaSpaces XAP, the In-Memory Data Grid is only one part of the picture. In addition to data caching and clustering, XAP also provides reliable and scalable messaging, and advanced grid services such as the ability to automatically deploy middleware and applications on hardware resources based on their service levels and current loads. All these capabilities are provided by XAP’s unified clustering layer, and packaged together with your application in a single, lightweight container. If you don’t need these extra capabilities today, you’re free to use only the In-Memory Data Grid. But at any point in the future you can start using them and gain substantial benefits – with no migration and no changes to existing applications.
  
  
  Because XAP is a complete solution, it is the only product that can guarantee performance and scalability from the load balancer on the front-end to the database on the back-end, on a single platform; provide an extra performance edge by eliminating network hops between middleware components; achieve true linear scalability for your entire application and its middleware, not just for the data; prevent unplanned downtime, by detecting high loads and automatically spreading them over more machines; and provide full interoperability between Java, .NET and C++, and tight integration with popular frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. Read more about GigaSpaces XAP's unique differentiators from other data grid products.
• What if my application is already using a data grid/caching product?
• That's fine. Coherence and Terracotta, for example, support Spring, so it's easy to plug them into GigaSpaces XAP and enhance them with XAP's messaging capabilities, the SLA-driven container and deployment capabilities. In fact, in many respects this approach works much better than running these products within a JEE container such as WebLogic. This is because of GigaSpaces XAP's "tier-less" approach and virtualization capabilities. The fact that XAP relies purely on memory for high-availability makes it extremely efficient compared to JEE app servers. In addition, it was designed from the ground up for a scale-out architecture model (horizontal scalability), which helps get more value out of data grid/distributed caching products. Our native support for Spring makes the integration and configuration extremely simple.
• How is GigaSpaces XAP related to Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions like Amazon EC2?
• Infrastructure as a Service solutions like Amazon EC2 give you great flexibility for developing custom applications using any technology - but IaaS clouds don't provide most of the basic platform and middleware capabilities required by enterprise applications. GigaSpaces XAP can be used in combination with Infrastructure as a Service solutions, to provide comprehensive platform features including multi-tenancy, automatic scalability, data grid services, messaging and remoting, map/reduce and parallel processing, admin and monitoring tools, native support for Java EE and major open frameworks, and much more. Read more about GigaSpaces XAP's cloud platform features.
  
  
  In fact, XAP + Amazon EC2 = PaaS: combining XAP with Amazon's infrastructure gives you a complete Platform as a Service solution. XAP is tightly integrated with Amazon EC2, ensuring that you get all the platform capabilities working out-of-the-box, just like other PaaS solutions on the market. Read more about GigaSpaces' Platform as a Service solution based on GigaSpaces XAP and Amazon EC2.
• How is GigaSpaces XAP related to Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions like Google App Engine?
• GigaSpaces offers a offers a complete Platform as a Service solution, which is an alternative to other PaaS solutions on the market. Like other solutions on the market, it allows you easily build web applications and benefit from the elasticity and scalability of the cloud. Unlike other solutions, GigaSpaces PaaS allows enterprises to deploy existing applications on the cloud, and easily build new enterprise applications on the cloud. GigaSpaces PaaS is designed to support everything from mission-critical applications demanding extreme performance, to large-scale web applications based on Java EE, Spring Framework, Jetty or Glassfish. The solution is used for SaaS enablement and cloud-based demos by ISVs, testing and faster prototyping by enterprise users, and for turn-key cloud projects by integrators and solution providers. It is based on GigaSpaces XAP, a high-end application server used by customers such as Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile and Sempra Energy, and on the robust infrastructure of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Read more about GigaSpaces' Platform as a Service solution.

Licensing and Pricing

• What types of licenses do you offer?
• GigaSpaces XAP is offered in two different packages - Standard and Premium. The Standard package is a low-cost option for small-to-medium environments with smaller networks and support requirements. It is limited to two servers (eight cores) and is eligible for Silver-level support only. The Premium package is for environments requiring high scalability, medium-to-large clusters, or in-depth support; it has no limit on the cluster size and allows customers to purchase up to Platinum support for 24/7 assistance with an on-site engineer.
  
  
  Both of these package are offered under three pricing options: Perpetual, Annual, and Pay-Per-Use. Perpetual is the traditional licensing model - pay a lump-sum once and use the software forever. Annual is an annual subscription, which you can choose to renew at the end of the year if you want to continue using XAP. Pay-Per-Use allows you to pay only for the number of machine hours you actually used XAP. The Pay-Per-Use option is relevant only if you use XAP on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Read more about XAP's licensing and pricing options.
• Do you have a subscription or pay-per-use pricing model?
• Yes! GigaSpaces is the only vendor in the industry with an elastic pricing model that adjusts to fit your financial needs. GigaSpaces XAP (both Standard and Premium packages) can be purchased with an annual subscription, which you can choose to renew at the end of the year if you want to continue using XAP. Alternatively, you can use XAP on the Amazon EC2 cloud and pay only for the machine hours you actually use. Read more about XAP's licensing and pricing options, or see our EC2 pricing page for details about pay-per-use pricing on the cloud.
• Does GigaSpaces offer a special product for the cloud?
• No, GigaSpaces XAP is the basis of GigaSpaces' cloud offering. The same product can be used both on-premise and on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Read more about GigaSpaces' Platform as a Service solution based on GigaSpaces XAP.
• What is the pricing for the GigaSpaces cloud offering?
• GigaSpaces offers a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution based on the GigaSpaces XAP product (the same product which many of our customers use on-premises) and Amazon EC2's robust infrastructure. When you use XAP on the cloud, you need to pay for two different components - the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, and usage of the XAP platform. GigaSpaces will bill you for both these components, indicating how much you are paying for the infrastructure and how much for the platform. For the current pricing and more details, see our Amazon EC2 pricing page.
• Can I get GigaSpaces XAP for free?
• Yes, we have several free and low-cost options for you to choose from:
  
  
  • You can use XAP's Community Edition, offered free of charge.
  • You can download and evaluate XAP with full functionality, free of charge, for a limited time period.
  • You can try out XAP free of charge on the cloud, with several realistic enterprise software scenarios.
  • You can use the GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution, with no upfront investment, and pay only for the machine hours you actually use.
  • You can purchase our Annual Subscription option and pay a lower fee, with the ability to extend the subscription at the end of the year.
  • You can opt for our Standard Package, suitable for small-to-medium environments with smaller networks and support requirements.

  Contact sales@gigaspaces.com to learn more about these and other low-cost options.

• Can I purchase your data grid/distributed caching solution separately?
• GigaSpaces XAP's In-Memory Data Grid functionality is not offered as a separate product. However, you can purchase a different package which includes the regular XAP product with only the In-Memory Data Grid functionality available. A competitively priced license can be provided upon request for this subset of functionality. Contact sales@gigaspaces.com for more details.

Frameworks, Standards and Open Source

• What development frameworks and platforms are supported by GigaSpaces XAP?
• XAP supports Java EE, Spring, Jetty, Ruby, Hibernate, Mule, Glassfish, and Lucene. XAP comes with built-in integration for all common relational databases, including open source databases such as MySQL, with the ability to persist data with 100% consistency and reliability and with zero performance impact. Integration with other frameworks, such as JPA, SimpleDB, Memcached, as well as caching support for Tomcat and iBatis, is available through OpenSpaces.org.
• Do you support standard Java EE applications?
• GigaSpaces XAP supports Java EE web applications out-of-the-box, with zero migration effort, using its built-in integration with Jetty and Glassfish. As for other parts of the Java EE spec (EJB, JMS, and so on) XAP offers equivalent functionality for messaging, remoting, business logic execution, and transactions (using the Spring transactions framework).
  
  
  GigaSpaces has made a decision to not fully comply with the Java EE standard, but we will continue to support specifications from the standard, including Java EE 6. If you have architectural components that absolutely have to rely on the Java EE specifications, XAP offers integration points so you can continue to use your Java EE components, while still benefiting from XAP's scalability and reliability.
• Does GigaSpaces XAP support standard APIs?
  
• GigaSpaces focuses on the runtime execution platform, not the APIs. GigaSpaces XAP allows you to leverage existing APIs, including standard JEE APIs (JDBC, JMS and JCA), and frameworks such as Spring, Mule and Hibernate. Additional abstractions can be achieved through the use of dependency injection, annotations and the OpenSpaces framework - GigaSpaces' open source development framework.
• What is OpenSpaces.org? Are you open source?
• GigaSpaces XAP is a closed-source product, but its API, called OpenSpaces, has been open sourced by GigaSpaces under the Apache 2.0 license. This means that anybody, including the large community of GigaSpaces users, can contribute to the API and develop their own extensions and integrations. This community is organized around the OpenSpaces.org website, which allows anyone to participate in open source development projects around GigaSpaces XAP. If you'd like to get the OpenSpaces source code, you can simply download the evaluation version of XAP - the source code is included.
• How does GigaSpaces XAP fit in with the open source stack?
• The open source movement has created an alternative middleware stack with frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate and Tomact, as well as other frameworks growing in popularity, such as Mule ESB. Web 2.0 has generated innovation, such as Hadoop (open source framework for parallel file search), Lucene (index server for search engines) and Compass (equivalent of Hibernate for Lucene) - and many AJAX frameworks. Many companies are already following the strategy of building their applications using an open middleware stack.

  GigaSpaces helps companies take this strategy to the next level by complementing those frameworks with runtime capabilities that address scalability, high-availability, performance, latency, deployment management, monitoring and more.

  The combination of GigaSpaces and these open frameworks creates an application server alternative that is compatible, but independent from, existing application servers. It is not bound to a specific standard, but is still compatible with different platforms that support those same open frameworks, thus avoiding vendor lock-in.

  The OpenSpaces development framework from GigaSpaces is provided with source code, under the Apache 2 license, as part of the product download, and is available as a fully open source project through OpenSpace.org. The core clustering engine will remain closed-sourced in the foreseeable future.

  At the end of the day, GigaSpaces' value is measured on our ability to improve performance, scalability and reliability, not on the API.

Adoption and Migration

• Do I need to retrain my people to use this new platform?
• It is true that, like with anything new, you will have to learn some new things, however the programming model remains the same (Spring, Hibernate, Mule, etc). 

  As one of our customers said, "When we first deployed XAP in 2005, the simplicity of the development and testing phase allowed us to get a 100% return on our investment before even going into production," (Alberto Santini, Head of Business Intelligence and Math Engine for Wealth Management, Monte Paschi Group). Since then XAP has taken significant strides towards an even lower learning curve and a standards-based, unintrusive programming experience.

  One engineer's experience: "I recently had the interesting challenge of moving a traditional JEE shop into the next generation of application server technology. You might be surprised to hear that the transformation took me only four days (two of them spent on Hibernate issues!)." Read the full story.

• How can I migrate an existing application to GigaSpaces?
• There are several options for migrating existing applications to GigaSpaces XAP:
  • Deploy an existing Spring application on the GigaSpaces SLA-driven containers. No code changes are required, only the packaging changes (no EAR files)
  • POJO session beans can be turned into scalable services seamlessly by plugging them into GigaSpaces' remoting implementation called the Service Virtualization Framework
  • Migrating messaging-oriented middleware (MOM) to the GigaSpaces virtual message bus is seamless, with the use of the JMS API. Mule can also be used to abstract the message flow
  • Migrating the data-tier to the GigaSpaces In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) is simple, assuming use of DAO and declarative transactions, and there are several API choices, such as Map/JCache or GigaSpaces extensions to the JavaSpaces API
• My application does not use Spring, is GigaSpaces XAP still relevant?
• Of course! It just means you may need to make some modifications to your code to benefit from GigaSpaces XAP's performance, scalability and reliability. But as GigaSpaces XAP supports standard APIs, such as JDBC and JMS, and provides integration with solutions such as Hibernate and Mule, the transition should be smooth and involve minimal code changes.

Backward Compatibility

• How will you continue to support application code written for older versions of your product?
• Our new product offerings do not change the product's basic specifications. Existing applications will run without changes on the new product release. We added more functionality into the offering in order to provide a more complete solution for our customers. XAP is modular and services which are not needed are not started and do not add any overhead. Read more about backward compatibility in the XAP documentation.

Miscellaneous

• What kind of support do you offer?
• Over the past several years, GigaSpaces has proved the maturity and innovation of its technology with hundreds of customers and mission-critical applications requiring extreme processing power. We have been supporting these customers with enterprise level standards, up to 24/7 support by senior GigaSpaces engineers. For more details, see our support options.
• How do I configure security for my 3000 groups and 200,000 users?
  
• GigaSpaces has partnered with leading best-of-breed providers of security frameworks. We felt this approach would enables the flexibility required, allowing you to choose the best technology available in the market for your needs.
• Are GigaSpaces-hosted web containers compatible with standard security practices, or do I need to do something special?
• You don't need to do anything special. The same procedures followed in the organization to configure current installations and settings should apply to GigaSpaces XAP.