Any Speed. Any Scale.
GigaSpaces XAP is a powerful in-memory data grid for ultra-fast transactional processing and task execution, giving digital applications high availability, reliability, and scale. For organizations that depend on accurate, near real-time responses and require full persistence and ACID compliance, XAP accelerates digital applications at the speed and scale of your business, across any environment.
Overview
XAP improves the performance, scalability, and reliability of applications that require high-speed access to frequently accessed data. It offers unique capabilities that are not available in simple caching solutions, such as full SQL compatibility, multi-criteria queries, dynamic server-side processing, full data integrity, policy-driven data tiering, seamless database integration, and hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
Key Business Benefits
- Millisecond response time. Enhances customer experience with near-instant data access.
- Smart data management. Balances cost and performance by placing only the most valuable data in RAM.
- Faster time-to-market. Easy deployment and integration shorten project timelines.
- Always-on availability. High availability guarantees business continuity.
- Consistent service levels. Maintains business and service levels for applications under any load and demand.
Under the XAP Hood
High Availability
XAP is an always-on, ACID-compliant, and secured system, with disaster recovery ensured through efficient data replication (Active-Active) between sites, including hybrid environments.
Business-Driven Storage Tiering
Data is stored in multiple tiers, hot (in-memory) and warm (SSD). User-defined business rules place the most important data, the most accessed data, or the data that should be retrieved the fastest, in hot storage, while less frequently accessed data is kept in warm storage.
Persistence and Never Lose Writes
XAP data persistence handles fast cache recovery from the persistence layer (source) and delegates changes made within the space to the persistence layer (endpoint). The XAP mirror service (write-behind) provides reliable asynchronous persistence so data is never lost in the event of a failure, with strong consistency that ensures data integrity and freshness, unlike caching solutions that support only eventual consistency between nodes.
Scaling Up and Out
XAP delivers a scaling process that can be performed both horizontally and vertically, automatically increasing or reducing the number of partitions allocated to a service, over Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or GigaSpaces ElasticGrid, in a rolling manner with no downtime or performance impact.
Flexible Deployment
XAP can be deployed on any public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environment: easy deployment and provisioning across any scale; hot rolling and automated deployment, upgrading, monitoring, scaling, and recovery; support for elastic orchestration systems such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift; and efficient, cost-effective data replication across regions, clouds, or between on-premises and cloud deployments.
Native Multi-Criteria Queries and Fast Aggregations
XAP supports an unlimited number of advanced indexes, including nested objects, collections, compound index, geo-spatial, and full-text search, with SQL-99 compliance, creating additional indexing data structures on only one instance of data. Aggregation is performed server-side, in the same memory space as the data, avoiding data retrieval back to the client and reducing networking and serialization overhead.
Multi-Model Data Support
XAP is a multi-model cache that supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data models in a single solution, without fragmenting data across multiple different data stores.
No Code, One-Click Database Integration
With just one click, the platform scans the database and its metadata, maps its data modeling to the GigaSpaces store, and defines its indexing and partitioning schema, eliminating weeks of manual work and human errors.
Operational Reporting
XAP easily integrates with operational reporting and data integration tools.
How XAP Works
Digital applications, mobile, desktop, web apps and APIs, and BI tools, connect to XAP's rich data access API. Inside the grid, colocated code, transactional support, event-driven processing, monitoring, and security and compliance controls operate directly on data held in partitions distributed across the cluster, each replicated for high availability. Business-driven tiering keeps hot data in RAM and optional warm data on SSD, and the grid scales those partitions up or out as load changes.
XAP FAQs
Answers to the questions we hear most from teams evaluating XAP.
XAP is an in-memory data processing platform (grid) that runs low-latency applications. It complements real-time databases by managing and caching portions of the data.
Yes, XAP is middleware that optimizes data access patterns, and can be scaled to support thousands of concurrent transactions.
No, XAP only replicates the critical or latency-sensitive data. Other data can be stored on SSDs or similar storage devices.
XAP learns the relationship between the objects in the grid, and as with databases, can execute complex SQL queries. XAP is not an alternative for a data warehouse, and cannot be used to run analytics on huge amounts of data.
It takes just a few minutes to set up and load business logic if a Kubernetes cluster is available.
XAP primarily supports structured data, but can support unstructured data and document formats in certain use cases.
XAP has a built-in mechanism to support in-memory event notifications and other types of memory buses. It can be easily integrated with any streaming solution such as Apache Kafka.
XAP clusters can be replicated from any environment to any other environment.
XAP supports all kinds of application workloads such as in-memory event buses, local caching, custom embedded code, and application management and orchestration. XAP can store Java objects, documents, and key-value pairs, and utilizes secondary indices for efficient memory consumption and ease of use.
Yes, XAP arrives with an embedded disk-based solution, which persists the data to enable fast recovery, and lowers TCO.
Yes, XAP maintains a synchronized replica that allows consistent replication. It also manages failover, split brains, and data affinity if the primary partition is not available.
XAP can be used as a pure caching solution by moving data closer to microservices, but also provides ultra-fast processing, high availability, and consistency.
Kafka is a streaming bus that supports pub/sub patterns and stores data temporarily on disk. XAP stores data in-memory and provides efficient access tools similar to RDBMS, such as indexing and embedded code. XAP uses real-time, in-memory Java objects with no need to transform to and from JSON.
XAP is used primarily for mission-critical use cases such as online trading, real-time risk management, and in retail, transportation, and healthcare. XAP is also used in data processing for AI and large language models.
Yes it does. XAP can store Java objects, documents, and key-value pairs, and utilizes secondary indices for efficient memory consumption and ease of use. XAP also includes a .NET SDK and libraries for native integrations.