CTO Note: Memory is the New Disk for the Enterprise

The data center is changing. Memory resources are now available at greater capacity and at lower cost – it is now possible to manage terabytes of data completely in memory. At the same time, network bandwidth is growing exponentially, with 10GE available already today and 40GE and 100GE on the horizon. Multi-core is becoming mainstream with 8-12 cores already available, providing computing power that was previously available only on super computers, now at an affordable cost. And with the advent of virtualization and multi tenancy, it is becoming much simpler to allocate these resources on-demand, share them, and utilize them across the data center.

Increasingly, the question is how to take advantage of these powerful and cost-effective resources. The relational database, which has been the storage system of choice for several decades, was built under the assumption that memory is scarce and the network is a bottleneck – plus it doesn’t scale to the level required by today's large-scale applications. Virtually every popular web application has found that a single relational database cannot meet its throughput requirements.

In addition, taking advantage of fast networks (through distributed computing) and multi-core capacity (through concurrent programming) is still fairly complex, and is therefore in limited use by most existing platforms and applications. The situation is not that different with virtualization, which has simplified the hardware and OS layers, but has left considerable complexity at the middleware and application levels.

A New Class of Platform is Needed

It is becoming clear that to take full advantage of the new memory, network, and compute resources, a new class of platform is needed. One that can manage large volumes of data in-memory, and can exploit the new network and multi-core capacity, through a combination of distributed scale-out and scale-up patterns. The key characteristics of this emerging platform are:

Virtualization enablement – because the new data center is increasingly based on virtualized hardware. Better virtualization support means improved hardware utilization and even bigger cost savings.
Multi-tenancy support – because in the world of private and public clouds, the cost benefits of sharing applications on the same hardware are extremely compelling, and this requires a solution for multi-tenancy.

How Does XAP Help Enterprises and Software Vendors Leverage these Trends?

GigaSpaces XAP is the only single-platform middleware that provides all of the core middleware services (data, messaging, and processing) fully in-memory.

Here is what we’ve done to take XAP even closer to this vision, in the recent 7.0 release and the upcoming 7.1 release (slated for April 14, 2010):

Fast network – XAP 7.1 will make dynamic scaling simple by enabling you to set up distributed system with a single API call. This not only provides a simpler API for developers, but also eliminates manual work for sizing, provisioning, and configuration at the deployment stage, and reduces the maintenance effort by automatically adjusting cluster configuration in response to changing loads, machine failure, and other events.
Large memory – XAP can manage terabytes of data in memory. It can even manage up to 384 GB in a single VM, through its certification for use with Cisco UCS, coming up in version 7.1.
Multi-core – as of version 7.1, XAP comes with new concurrent transaction management for better utilization of multi-core processors. This comes on the heels of major improvements in multi-core utilization in version 7.0, which resulted in a 300% performance improvement on the Intel Nehalem processor. New benchmarks will shortly be released showcasing the performance of XAP 7.1 on Cisco UCS, which is based on the latest multi-core technology.
Virtualization and multi-tenancy – XAP 7.1 is the first middleware platform with built-in multi-tenancy, making it extremely simple to share applications on the same resources with full isolation and enterprise-grade security. This dramatically cuts the cost per user for software vendors that use XAP for SaaS-enablement, because it enables them to cram more users onto the same hardware resources. Full VMware integration is also available, enabling multi-tenancy throughout the entire virtualized application stack.

Final Words

The new data center presents a wealth of opportunities and cost benefits, and it is becoming clear that the database is not enough to take advantage of these opportunities. I think everyone in our industry should be investigating new solutions, such as NOSQL and memory-based platforms, not as a replacement for today’s databases, but as an augmenting strategy that can leverage the new and powerful resources at our disposal.

Regards,
Nati S.

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CTO Note: Memory is the New Disk for the Enterprise