GigaSpaces Update Appeals To Mainstream Developers

GigaSpaces Technologies, which specializes in products that address scalability in the application stack, is now shipping eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) 8.0, which enables organizations to transition their existing infrastructure into more modern systems such as distributed architectures, virtualized environments and the cloud. The company says its Same Data, Any API capability promotes openness and interoperability, supporting all common interfaces for accessing data, such as Memcached, JPA, JMS, Document and the "highly efficient" native object-oriented API.

The ability to choose the best API for the use case at hand and operate on the same data, regardless of the APIs chosen, significantly decreases the learning curve associated with adopting the XAP technology. Also new with 8.0 is its support for continuous scaling, which allows for rolling upgrades, continuous deployment, quick introduction of complex features and real-time changes to the applications data model, business logic or even underlying platform with zero downtime.

Scalability has tended to be introduced as an afterthought, says GigaSpaces, with the philosophy that "we'll worry about it when we get there." With the emergence of cloud computing, scalability must be thought about from day one, and this situation has resulted in what the company calls the "scalability tsunami." Combine that with the recent trend of having to do more with less, and scalability becomes even more critical.

That's where the latest enhancements to XAP come in--the openness and scalability, multi
tenancy and improved efficiency. It deals with the challenge getting to better agility and reducing the time between developing a new feature and putting it into production, says the company. Version 8.0 also simplifies operations and administration with its elastic middleware capabilities that encompass the entire application stack, says GigaSpaces. By identifying problematic or erroneous situations and reporting them to the user, the new, simplified Alerting API enables real-time problem isolation and prevention. In addition, the new multisite deployment support makes deploying and managing geographically distributed applications easier.

"Through the introduction of JPA, Memcache, REST, etc. APIs support, XAP 8.0 becomes more appealing for mainstream developers that so far have not considered the product or similar products from competitors such as Oracle, VMware/Gemstone, IBM and Terracotta  due to the complexity and lock-in risk of the native XAP APIs," says analyst Massimo Pezzini, VP and Gartner Fellow. "Although other vendors support some standard APIs--for example, Oracle supports JPA for its Coherence product--none support Memcached."The new functionality is significant, but the main challenge for XAP is adoption from system integrators, ISVs, cloud service providers and SaaS vendors, which may not be willing to adopt technology from a relatively small vendor like GigaSpaces, says Pezzini. According to the 10-year-old company, it has only 350 customers globally.

Pezzini thinks the key for XAP adoption could be Memcached support, something the other vendors don't provide. "This is an extremely popular open-source distributed caching platform--as an example, Facebook is a massive user of this technology. By supporting the Memcached APIs, GigaSpaces has now a powerful tool to up-sell to the Memcached installed base."

Another factor is that large software vendors (such as Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and VMware/SpringSource) see these technologies as key enablers for a variety of other strategies, such as BPM, ESB, application servers and cloud. XAP has been utilized primarily by financial services companies, especially to support trading types of applications, but the last three years have seen growing adoption in verticals such as Web commerce, online gaming and cloud/SaaS, as well as in commercial banking and other segments to support application scenarios such as mainframe offloading.

"This growing adoption, including increasingly by mainstream enterprises, is calling for a standardization. Although there is no credible standardization industry effort taking place, APIs like JPA, Memchached, Ehcache are rapidly emerging as de facto standards for DCPs [distributed caching platforms or memory data grids]", said Pezzini.

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