GigaSpaces XAP Architecture

Single Platform

Most enterprise applications rely on numerous pieces of middleware. These may be bundled and provided by the same vendor, but nevertheless they’re different software products – each represents one more “moving part” that threatens the scalability, performance and reliability of your applications. Each adds integration pains and more overhead for your operations team. And together, they represent a very high license and maintenance cost.

GigaSpaces XAP unites all these different parts into one platform. It provides all the middleware functions in-memory, in-process, including data storage and management, messaging, and processing for software services. All these functions share the same built-in clustering, providing high availability right out of the box. They provide the same functionality both on and off the cloud, bridging the gap between new and traditional infrastructure. They are also packaged in one lightweight container which can be deployed automatically. You’ll find that the more extensively you use XAP, the less you’ll pay for licenses and maintenance, and the closer you’ll get to a truly reliable, manageable middleware stack.

Key Benefits

• Cut software maintenance and license costs
• Reduce operations overhead
• Speed up and simplify software development
• Improve testability, quality and reliability
• Risk-free cloud migration

High-Performance

Traditional software architectures are highly centralized and complex, and thus prone to bottlenecks. This is a big problem for demanding applications that need to keep response times to a minimum. The centralized database, and the physical disk it runs on, is the #1 performance issue. Next in line are the large number of “moving parts” and the network hops between these different parts – each network hop increases the time it takes for the system to respond.

GigaSpaces XAP, the eXtreme Application Platform, powers the world’s fastest applications – transaction processing at leading stock exchanges, real-time currency trading, and online gaming. It performs fast, in-memory processing, which is as reliable as a traditional database without the performance penalty. And it is the only product that runs the application and all its middleware in the same process, eliminating moving parts and resulting in zero network hops. And it provides the same high performance in virtualized and public cloud environments.

Key Benefits

  Guarantee extreme performance and lowest latency

  Even better service levels on less hardware

  High performance on commodity hardware

  High performance in cloud/virtualized environments

  High performance with commodity databases

Read More

  GigaSpaces XAP benchmarks

  Cut 80% hardware by boosting performance

  High performance on HP Blades

  High performance and scalability for MySQL

Scalable On-Demand

Scalability beyond a single machine is always complex, and often requires complete re-architecture of an application, which can cost millions. Scalability is also non-linear, so every notch of growth requires more hardware – until the application cannot scale further. The root cause of these problems is that traditional software architecture wasn’t designed for scalability – it is complex and has centralized components, primarily the database, which quickly become overloaded when the application grows.

GigaSpaces XAP addresses this root cause by packaging the entire application, from the load balancer on the front-end to the database on the back-end, into a lightweight scalable unit, running entirely in-memory. Simply duplicating this unit on additional machines gives you unlimited, linear scalability. XAP distributes the data between these in-memory units, releasing the database bottleneck. It also balances resources on-the-fly, by automatically deploying scalable units based on custom service levels you define. XAP provides the same proven automatic scaling in virtualized and public cloud environments.

Application Server Cluster Right Out of the Box

GigaSpaces XAP has built-in application server clustering capabilities, scaling up to hundreds of cluster nodes. Unlike other application servers, XAP does not require complex configuration or know-how to setup a cluster. Administrators need only specify how many cluster nodes and backups are required, and XAP automatically deploys and wires the application server instances.

Key Benefits

  Reduce the cost of supporting business growth

  Enable scaling down to free up resources

  Enable applications to meet unpredictable loads

  Substantially increase hardware utilization

  Improve utilization of multi-core machines

  Extreme scalability on commodity hardware

  Automatic scaling in virtualized/cloud environments

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  Save 15-90% hardware costs when scaling up

  Web application scalability benchmark

  Multi-core scalability benchmark

  The Scalability Revolution (white paper)

Always On

Mission-critical applications are almost always backed up by solid high availability systems, but this is not enough to prevent downtime. Many organizations experience catastrophic system failure, due to unpredictable loads which overwhelm the available hardware. Crashes or slowdowns simply cannot be avoided, because even if additional hardware is available elsewhere in the organization, the application cannot take advantage of it fast enough.

GigaSpaces XAP powers mission critical applications at Fortune 100 companies such as Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile and Societé General, which face extremely high, fluctuating loads. 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. 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.

Key Benefits

  Eliminate unplanned downtime and slowdowns

  Prevent problems by resolving issues automatically

  No need to invest in spare capacity to prepare for high loads

  Guaranteed response time

  Improved availability with hot failover and self-healing

  Simplified, commoditized high availability

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  Zero downtime under unpredictable load

  How Virgin Mobile uses XAP to prevent downtime

Open Application Server

GigaSpaces XAP gives you freedom of choice. It supports major open frameworks and standards, including Spring and Java EE, making it easier to use with existing applications. XAP provides full interoperability between Java, C++ and .NET. XAP allows enterprises to build applications once, using existing skills, and run them on any hardware in any environment – private or public clouds, virtualized operating systems, commodity hardware or specialized high-end systems – with no changes to code or configuration. XAP even allows you to move applications between traditional and cloud or virtualized environments at the click of a button, letting you choose your optimal mix of new and traditional computing models.

Most importantly, XAP integrates seamlessly with any existing application infrastructure,  including traditional application servers, ESBs, databases and enterprise grid. Many customers use only some of XAP’s capabilities, filling in the rest with existing systems. This makes it possible to make a gradual transition to XAP, and also to easily remove any part of the XAP infrastructure, minimizing lock-in to GigaSpaces technology.

Need to Scale a J2EE Application? XAP Offers Comprehensive J2EE Support

GigaSpaces XAP is a scalable and lightweight alternative to traditional J2EE application servers. Fully integrated with the Spring Framework and the Jetty web container, XAP supports standard WAR file deployment and session high availability, and provides full dynamic scaling for standard J2EE applications. Existing J2EE users can plug in GigaSpaces XAP for high performance data and messaging.

 Key Benefits

  Reduce vendor lock-in

  Protect and use your historic investments

  Increase adoption of commodity databases

  Leverage existing skill-sets

  Use the cloud with no migration costs

  Combine traditional/virtualized/cloud infrastructure

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  Migration to XAP - see how easy it is

  OpenSpaces.org

  Native .NET support

  C++ support

  Java EE and Glassfish support

  Spring integration

  Jetty web container integration

  Mule integration

Groovy / JRuby / JavaScript support