Archive for the 'GigaSpaces' Category
Beyond Data Grid - Tech Talk
July 2nd, 2008The tech talk I did with Jason Carriera talking about data grids and beyond is online. Check it out here.
Collocated Indexing and Distributed Search with GigaSpaces
June 28th, 2008Compass 2.0 already comes with an integration between GigaSpaces and Lucene/Compass. The integration allows to store the Lucene index (using Lucene Directory) abstraction on top of GigaSpaces. It also allows to use GigaSpaces mirror services allowing to automatically index the content of the data grid (Space) in an asynchronous reliable manner.
The current integration provides great [...]
How scalable is GigaSpaces? – The GigaSpaces XAP 6.5 Benchmark Report
June 27th, 2008As you all know GigaSpaces XAP 6.5 is on its way out to the market. This release involves incredible effort that is basically a collection of large amount of improvements with the product scalability. These are result of feedback we gathered from the field and customers around the globe. One of the final tasks we [...]
TSSJS Prague: my take-aways
June 27th, 2008Once again TSSJS was a well-organized event with lots of interesting content. Hot topics that I took notice of were RIA, new languages, and obviously distributed computing and scalability. I arrived on Tuesday morning, which gave me a chance to…
GigaSpaces Updates on Twitter
June 27th, 2008Those of you with Twitter accounts can now follow GigaSpaces-related updates on the GigaSpaces Twitter stream that was set up by Jim Liddle. You can also follow me at: http://twitter.com/gevaperry
Cloud Computing ? Cloud Opportunity !
June 26th, 2008There has been a lot of talk around Cloud Computing, a lot in the press, and it is currently the buzzword for the analysts. It’s often referred interoperably with software-as-a-service (SAAS) as both models offer computing on demand. Make no mistake Cloud Computing is not a fad and its not something for the future. It is here now and it is here to stay. In the future we will see more and more organisations shift from hosting their own services in DataCentre’s to using a “Cloud Platform” in which their services are stored. This cloud platform could use something like Amazon EC2 which provides the basic infrastructure or it could be Amazon EC2 + GigaSpaces if you require SLA guarantee’s, low latency, and the ability to scale out as well as handle spikes in service demand. Alternatively it could be Google Gears which acts as the cloud middleware and which enables you to have offline as well as an online capability.
For some organisations it will take a while to feel comfortable having their data and service held offline hosted by a cloud provider. In particular this occurs within the finance domain, although I have no doubt that, over time, this will change. The Security levels are already available, it is more to do with the level of comfort they feel about doing this with what they regard as their IP. Even for these organisations the Cloud offers opportunities as well as savings. Having to wait 3 months or more for provisioning some equipment to do some design or test ? No longer, just rent by the hour at a click of a button and then tear the whole thing down when you are done. Need to prove your app’ can scale out over 100’s of servers but finding hardware to do this proving difficult ? Just rent as much as you need for 48 hours to do your real world scalability testing.
For Online organisations (web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0) the choice is more clear cut. Why would you not do it ? You are in the bsiness of selling a service not maintaining middleware.
The Cloud also reduces the barriers to entry. Had a great idea for a while but couldn’t work out how you would get the budget together to showcase your application ? No problem, the cloud services are perfect for this. For traders, and those in other Domains with specialist knowledge the Cloud offers an opportunity to build your amazing idea or service and compete with the big boys.
Lets say you had an idea for an online app that needed to interact with mobile. You could build the service in Google Gears so that it can be accessed online and also for mobile. And if the network onnection goes down you can continue to work offline be in your browser or on your phone and then the synchronisation servers can resync neext time you are back online. Now think about this, think about all the things you would need to do if you were to build the application yourself and also figure out the infrastrcture to allow this functionality as well as ensuring the hosting was always available,
I’m not saying that the Cloud is the panacea for all things to do with infastructure and IT but I believe it does provide some incredible opportunities for those willing to take them.
InfoQ Article - RAM is the new disk…
June 24th, 2008Steven Robbins published an interesting article on InfoQ titled RAM is the new disk. In the comment thread, Steven Robbins quoted Tim Bray and others comparing file system performance to memory: Memory is the new disk! With disk speeds growing…
TSS Prague
June 20th, 2008TSS at Prague was great. Great sessions, always great meeting up with people from all over the world. Sadly, I did not manage to get to too many sessions, had to work a bit on GigaSpaces upcoming 6.5 GA release, but the ones I went to were really good.
I also did a tech talk with [...]
RAM is the new disk
June 19th, 2008Interesting Article at InfoQ entitled “RAM is the new Disk”. The article digs into a couple of statements by Jim Gray that “Ram is the new disk” and “disk is the new tape”. It refers to an article by Tim Bray which discusses how RAM clusters are so much faster than disk clusters and his journey in the world of Grid and distributed computing for “an application” he “was thinking of”.
The article covers a broad range of technology but it would have been useful to understand the actual use case that Tim had in mind. He also touches upon the Jini Rio Framework - “It’s pretty clear that understanding Rio is going to take a lot of work, and if you’re going to be using something for infrastructure in a large-scale high-performance situation, it’s important to understand all the layers thoroughly. I think that Rio has a terrific future, but seriously needs work to reduce the barrier to entry.” Well, the GigaSpaces Service Grid is a driven dynamic monitoring and management component that was originally based upon Jini and is is pretty amazing in what it can do, and it really is easy to use as well as providing SLA driven real-time enterprise features and the power that obviously so impressed Tim.
Back to the InfoQ article, in which Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO expands on the notion of RAM being the new disk explaining the limitations of database clustering and database partitioning as means to provide performance and scale saying “The fundamental problems with both database replication and database partitioning are the reliance on the performance of the file system/disk and the complexity involved in setting up database clusters.” Nati’s offered solution is the GigaSpaces In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG), backed by Hibernate 2nd level cache or GigaSpaces Spring DAO, to provide Persistence as a Service for your applications. Finally the article lists the benefits of an IMDG over a traditional DB:
- - Relies on memory which is significantly faster and more concurrent than file systems
- - Data can be accessed by reference
- - Data manipulation is performed directly on the in-memory objects
- - Reduced contention for data elements
- - Parallel aggregated queries
- - In-process local cache
- - Avoid Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)
I think the article highlights the shift that is occurring in how we think about data, where we hold it, how we reference it, and how we guarantee its availability and quality of service be that how it scales, how fast it is, or how it is distributed. All things that the folks at GigaSpaces have been talking about for a long time now….
GigaSpaces Twitter
June 17th, 2008I’ve been using Twitter for while and it continues to be useful to keep in touch in real-time with friends as well as business contacts. I think it’s a useful way to get information (when it works…but that is another story see - Nati Shalom’s blog post on this here). I’ve set up a GigaSpaces Twitter profile and you can follow posts at twitter.com/gigaspaces.
Meet us @ TSSJS Prague
June 16th, 2008TheServerSide has a good record of picking nice spots for their conferences, and this year’s Java Symposium in Prague is no exception. It’s looking to be a fun event, as I’m going to meet not just lots of old friends,…
Economies of Non-Scale
June 4th, 2008Scalability forces us to think differently. What worked on a small scale doesn’t always work on a large scale — and costs are no different. To measure the cost impact of scaling, let’s look at the amount of resources required…
