Linear scalability, extremely low latency, and high availability on commodity hardware

GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) supports Extreme Transaction Processing with linear scalability, extremely low latency, and high availability-on commodity hardware, without changes to the application.

Business Challenge

Today's mission-critical transaction processing systems-from electronic trading to online banking to e-commerce-are burdened with more data, more clients, and more services than ever before. In an environment where milliseconds matter and processing demand is growing exponentially, traditional transactional approaches are falling short when it comes to scalability, latency, and availability. These shortcomings are giving rise to the need for a new breed of Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications that can:

• Scale quickly to support fast and unpredictable growth.
• Handle exceptionally demanding requirements in complex, distributed environments including event-driven and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).
• Ensure high availability and reduce end-to-end latency to meet SLAs.

XAP Provides

GigaSpaces XAP has been battle-tested in a host of XTP scenarios – 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.

GigaSpaces XAP also addresses the causes of scalability problems in traditional software architectures. It does this 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. XAP also balances the available resources on-the-fly, by automatically deploying the scalable units based on custom policies and service levels you define. 

 GigaSpaces XAP enables XTP applications that:

• Deliver the lowest possible latency by accessing and processing data and events locally and in-memory
• Collapse the tiers, thereby eliminating network hops
• Co-locate services with shared memory
• Scale-out without increasing complexity by adding more self-sufficient processing units
• Scale the data and the processing at the same time through partitioning of processing units
• Make it easy to guarantee the reliability of each processing unit's data
• Offer distributed transactions to coordinate complex operations across workflows

Usage Scenarios

 XAP is ideal for any kind of XTP application, including:

• Market data and trading applications in the Financial Services industry
• Pre-paid systems in the Telecom industry
• Online reservations sytems in the Travel industry
• High-volume portals in Government organizations

Related Resources:

• GigaSpaces XAP with HP BladeSystem
• GigaSpaces XAP with HP ProLiant servers
• GigaSpaces and MySQL
• Nati Shalom's blog about building XTP applications with GigaSpaces