In times like these, improving application performance isn't a major focus for most IT organizations. The common perception is that as long as you're meeting the bare minimum demanded by your users, you're okay - anything beyond that is a luxury you can't afford. Well, I happen to think this perception is dead wrong: these days, you just can't afford not to invest in high performance. The reason is simple: high performance == higher utilization.

I'll explain what I mean. If you do something that makes an application run 10 times faster (this is a typical performance boost experienced by GigaSpaces users - and by the way, XAP 7.0 will be even faster), without changing your loads or service levels, then that application will consume 90% less resources. Or in other words, you can consolidate the servers running this application at a ratio of 10:1. The amazing thing is, this isn't instead of the server consolidation you'll get from vendors like VMware - it comes on top of and in addition to it, because it helps you cram more virtual machines and more applications onto every piece of physical hardware.

A great example of this is an eBay subsidiary, Marktplaats, which has moved its application to XAP and is now expecting to reduce their data center from a few hundred servers to only a handful - the consolidation ratio is a whopping 18:1. Marktplaats says this reduction is largely a result of the huge performance boost they experienced, which was made possible by XAP's In-Memory Data Grid and parallel processing capabilities.

XAP also makes it possible for extreme performance to thrive in unexpected places - one example is an XTP trading platform which, thanks to GigaSpaces XAP, has become SaaS-enabled, a major differentiator for the platform's makers, Orbyte Solutions. Another is our recently-announced joint solution with Mule, the open source ESB, which proves that "high performance SOA" is not an oxymoron :)

Best regards,
Nati S.

Marktplaats, a hugely popular Dutch classified website (over 6.4 million unique visitors per month) owned by eBay, is using XAP to power their home-grown pay-per-click ad engine and classifieds application.

XAP is helping Marktplaats release their data bottlenecks and parallelize processing, resulting in improved performance that will allow them to consolidate servers by an unheard-of ratio of 18:1 (from a baseline of several hundred servers).

According to Cees de Groot, lead architect at Marktplaats:

"The transaction speed XAP delivered for our sponsor ad engine is phenomenal. Our initial setup is able to run at 100k writes per second and 150k writes per second, on just two machines. With these speeds, we expect that we'll need only a handful of machines to handle our current load, with room to spare - down from several hundred servers in our current data center."

This cost saving is substantial but is only one part of the story - Marktplaats expects traffic to grow tremendously over the next few years, and is using GigaSpaces XAP to prepare. De Groot says that:

"With XAP's on-demand scalability we can just add more and more commodity servers gradually to meet that growth, plugging them into the cluster with no re-architecture or even configuration changes. Because XAP is linearly scalable, I know in advance that I only need to multiply the number of servers by the percentage increase in traffic. There won't be any surprises."

Marktplaats is using XAP as a single platform that addresses the entire middleware stack - it functions as app server, reliable messaging system, distributed caching system and deployment framework. XAP will also run the site's web container, which will be integrated with the Citrix NetScaler load balancer.

It's also interesting to note that Marktplaats is using VMware to run their testing environment, and has created a GigaSpaces VM to simplify deployment of GigaSpaces on that environment.

Learn more by attending a live seminar by Marktplaats and Tricode (GigaSpaces' Strategic Partner in the Benelux)

Orbyte Solutions is using XAP to power a new trading platform, which it hires out to CFD, FX and SpreadBetting businesses. Like other trading systems, Orbyte's platform is in the high-end class of eXtreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications, which process large volumes of data and deliver extremely high throughput and millisecond-level latency.

But what's special about Orbyte's platform is that thanks to XAP, it is SaaS-enabled and cloud enabled. This is particularly interesting because high-end XTP applications have often been thought to be too demanding to run on cloud resources. SaaS-enablement is only one of a long list of next-generation back-end features advertised by Orbyte, all of which are powered to some extent by XAP.

Feeling a bit skeptical that a true XTP application can really deliver extreme performance and reliability on the cloud? Well, see it for yourself! Orbyte has been kind enough to provide two demo accounts of their platform, running on Amazon EC2. The demo system will be live for the next 48 hours only, until 10PM GMT on May 29. Here are the test accounts:

demo account 1
username: test221
password: zv2212

demo account 2
username: test222
password: xr2226

			Try the live demo of Orbyte's SaaS FX trading platform (use the access details above)
			Watch "Amazon Start-up Event by Cedric Roll from ORbyte Solutions" (Orbyte's co-founder discussing the SaaS-enablement project)

Always thought that "high performance SOA" was an oxymoron? Well, it turns out that Mule, the most popular open source enterprise service bus (ESB), is increasingly used in mission-critical enterprise applications, which require 100% uptime and high, or even extreme, performance and latency. According to MuleSource's Ross Mason, many of these enterprise users have been urging MuleSource to create a joint solution with GigaSpaces, as a leading provider of these high-end capabilities. The joint solution is now publically available, proving that SOA can be not only flexible but also highly scalable and blazing fast.

			Read the announcement by Mule and GigaSpaces
			Learn more about the joint solution
			Watch "Scalable SOA with GigaSpaces and Mule" (recorded webinar)

GigaSpaces XAP 7.0 is edging closer to release. Here are three highlights from our latest additions to the product:

• Multi-zone deployment: allows users to divide the deployment environment into logical zones (a zone can be one machine, a rack of blade servers, or even an entire data center), and applying special deployment rules for each zone. For example, users can specify that primary and backup processing units should always be deployed on different zones, for improved redundancy.
• Performance increases: memory footprint reduced by up to 50%, improved local cache performance, particularly with ID-based operations, which are now over 40 times faster and support millions of reads per second.
• GUI overhaul: XAP's GUI now shows a physical hosts view, describing the physical infrastructure, with rich utilization statistics and the runtime state of all GigaSpaces components. There is also a new applications view which shows processing units and specific middleware components within them, such as event containers and data grid instances.

			See what else is new in the latest milestones of GigaSpaces 7.0
			Download Milestone 8