What is GigaSpaces XAP?

GigaSpaces' eXtreme Application Platform is an application server built to scale that provides you a way to see your entire set of computers as one single, simple runtime environment in which both your processes and your data can reside, enabling predictable improvement of application performance while you increase the volume of data, transactions, and number of users, with no real need to rearchitect.

What does GigaSpaces XAP offer you?

Seamless Scalability
GigaSpaces XAP also provides SLA-driven application monitoring and provisioning. If your application is responding too slowly, XAP will automatically distribute your applications to new cluster nodes. This means that you can not only predict performance at all times, but you get the benefits of a platform that's both resilient and self-healing. If a server fails, you won't even lose an in-progress transaction.

Standard Framework Support
XAP allows you to leverage the standard frameworks and support applications you use today, like Spring, Hibernate, Mule, and others. You can leverage your existing skillsets to build scalable applications.

Performance
With eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), your data and your processes can exist on the same physical server, in the same runtime environment, so network latency - such as the time it takes to talk to a database - doesn't become a factor. XAP can even automatically mirror your data into a database for permanent storage in the background.

Interoperability
GigaSpaces XAP lets you deploy applications that use Java, .Net, C++, or even scripting languages. Heterogeneous development environments can leverage your computing resources without expensive changes to existing code.

Web Application Support
Nearly every application today has a web interface. XAP 6.6 embeds the Jetty servlet container, which means you enjoy XAP's performance, scalability, and resiliency even for your existing web applications.

When should you use GigaSpaces?

• You want your application to achieve linear scalability without significant rearchitecture
• You face bottlenecks with your database, messaging or transaction management
• You need to handle distributed data, while keeping latency down to sub-millisecond performance
• You have a data-intensive application that requires near-real-time data processing
• You want to use your open source stack, adding the reliability, scalability and performance of a high-end application server
• You want to be able to scale on demand, avoiding expensive over-provisioning
• You need to guarantee that you'll meet your service level agreements under any load
• You distribute your application across multiple geographical sites over a WAN and need to ensure consistency
• You have a heterogeneous environment, with your application requiring .Net, C++ and/or Java applications to interoperate out of the box

Grow Your Business On Demand

GigaSpaces XAP is a scale-out application server that scales predictably, cost effectively, and on demand while ensuring extreme application performance-no matter how many users you have, how quickly your data volume grows, or how dramatically your application's processing load increases.

What does this mean for your business?

You no longer have to play the capacity "guessing game." Your applications will grow with your business.
Unpredictable changes in demand make it difficult to accurately forecast future application workload, so provisioning IT capacity for the future is basically a guessing game. Guess too low, and you risk poor application performance, costly downtime, and potential customer and revenue loss. Guess too high, and you end up wasting time and money on unnecessary machines.

GigaSpaces XAP takes the guesswork out of planning for future demand by allowing your applications to scale both up and down predictably and on demand. This means that you can also grow your business predictably and on demand, because your applications will be ready for any number of users, any amount of data, and any processing load-without changing the application or re-architecting the infrastructure.

You can improve application performance without server overkill.

The guessing game forces many companies to allocate expensive high-end servers to handle "just-in-case" peak loads and future growth, but those machines end up sitting idle most of the time. With server utilization rates as low as 15%-20%, these companies are at a competitive disadvantage to those that fully leverage their resources, and therefore have more money to spend on growing the business. 

GigaSpaces XAP is designed to work in distributed environments, including clouds and grids. It runs applications as self-contained systems, making it easy to add additional capacity as demand grows. If an application begins to run too slowly, XAP can boost performance by automatically distributing the self-contained application to other machines. This kind of guaranteed high performance means you can reduce both capital costs and operating costs by eliminating redundant and idle hardware and software.

You can cut costs and leverage economies of scale.

GigaSpaces XAP runs on low-cost commodity hardware and creates economies of scale by utilizing servers more efficiently. This capacity optimization increases return on investment and lowers total cost of ownership because it requires fewer software licenses, less hardware, less maintenance, and less testing throughout the entire application lifecycle. And it helps your organization take steps toward "greener," more environmentally friendly IT because it cuts down on power, air conditioning, and physical space requirements.

You can avoid costly downtime with "always on" availability.  

According to Forrester and Gartner, the cost of application downtime can easily exceed $100K per hour when you factor in the combined impacts on productivity, revenue, financial performance, and brand. GigaSpaces XAP can help you avoid downtime and continuously meet your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by ensuring that your business applications are reliable and resilient. XAP continually monitors application performance and automatically provisions new systems to take on additional transaction loads as needed. If one server fails, the application can be run on another server without risking transaction loss.

You can develop and deploy applications using standard frameworks.

GigaSpaces XAP supports standard development frameworks, so your teams can quickly create applications using their existing knowledge, tools, and programming skills. Shorter development, testing, and deployment phases mean your company can bring new services and functionality to your customers faster.

 

Non-linearly scalable applications are expensive and risky.

Minimise Total Cost of Ownership. Maximise Return on Investment.

Non-linearly scalable applications suffer from diminishing returns on added resources: each additional resource will increase system capacity by a smaller increment, and per-transaction costs will actually increase as the business grows. At some point, the application will hit a wall and crash, leading to a potentially devastating loss of customers and revenue and the need to repeatedly re-architect the application to accommodate growth.

GigaSpaces XAP enables linear, on-demand scalability 

GigaSpaces XAP allows applications to scale linearly: each additional resource will increase system capacity consistently and predictably. For example, if one server can process 500 transactions per second, two servers can process 1,000, ten servers can process 5,000, and so on. There are no diminishing returns, and no code changes required. Just drop in another box and increase capacity linearly with predictable performance, availability, survivability. 

Lower TCO	Higher ROI
Fewer servers to buy	No diminishing returns
Linear Scalability allows scaling out by adding more low-cost commodity machines to achieve higher throughput. On demand Scalability lets you avoid expensive over provisioning of servers that sit idle and take full advantage of the economies of scale offered by cloud computing Read the blog: GigaSpaces and the Economics of Cloud Computing	Each additional machine will increase system capacity predictably, with no diminishing returns as you add more machines. Double the throughput by doubling your resources - it's that simple XAP can also extend an application's life, since scaling it to meet growing demand does not require any code changes or re-writes.
	Increased utilization and throughput per server
	XAP dramatically improves utilization of the hardware. By putting the entire application in a container (all services, messaging, data and web container), and running it in-memory, in-process, XAP eliminates bottlenecks and enables each server to achieve a higher throughput.
Fewer middleware product licenses required per server	A single product replaces multiple products and eliminates integration costs
XAP handles messaging, data, and business logic all within the same product. There is no need to have dedicated experts and there is only one product license to buy. XAP also reduces or eliminates the need to purchase and/or integrate other aspects of middleware, such as high-availability (e.g., Veritas FS), clustering (e.g., Oracle RAC) or distributed transaction managers.	XAP comes pre-integrated with a web container, so it provides all middleware functionality in a single product, purchased with a single license, without requiring integration.
Shorter framework development, integration, testing, and change cycles	Leverage existing knowledge, tools, and systems
XAP is enterprise-ready right out of the box-including partitioning, replication, failover, and deployment mechanisms-so you don't have to spend time and money building a development and development framework	XAP supports common Java and .Net development frameworks including Spring, Mule, and J2EE, allowing developers to leverage their existing skill sets to improve performance for existing applications, and simplify future application development and planning to get new products and services to market faster.