Nati Shalom's Blog

The Need for Speed - Saving Costs By Improving Application Efficiency

In times like these, improving application performance isn't a major focus for most IT organizations. The common perception is that as long as you're meeting the bare minimum demanded by your users, you're okay - anything beyond that is a luxury you can’t afford. Well, I happen to think this perception is dead wrong: these days, you just can’t afford not to invest in high performance. The reason is simple: high performance == higher utilization.

I’ll explain what I mean. If you do something that makes an application run 10 times faster (this is a typical performance boost experienced by GigaSpaces users - and by the way, XAP 7.0 will be even faster), without changing your loads or service levels, then that application will consume 90% less resources. Or in other words, you can consolidate the servers running this application at a ratio of 10:1. The amazing thing is, this isn’t instead of the server consolidation you'll get from vendors like VMware - it comes on top of and in addition to it, because it helps you cram more virtual machines and more applications onto every piece of physical hardware.

A great example of this is an eBay subsidiary, Marktplaats, which has moved its application to XAP and is now expecting to reduce their data center from a few hundred servers to only a handful - the consolidation ratio is a whopping 18:1. Marktplaats says this reduction is largely a result of the huge performance boost they experienced, which was made possible by XAPs In-Memory Data Grid and parallel processing capabilities.

XAP also makes it possible for extreme performance to thrive in unexpected places - one example is an XTP trading platform which, thanks to GigaSpaces XAP, has become SaaS-enabled, a major differentiator for the platforms makers, Orbyte Solutions. Another is our recently-announced joint solution with Mule, the open source ESB, which proves that "high performance SOA" is not an oxymoron :)

My Personal Blog

Until now I have been posting my GigaSpaces related blogs on our company blog  where I shared my thoughts about distributed computing architecture in general and specifically Space Based Architecture.
We've decided to change the role of the GigaSpaces corporate blog from a place that hosts just my thoughts to a central channel that  aggregates different thoughts of different individuals both from within GigaSpaces and outside of it. This will include a distinguished list of bloggers listed below. We're also going to use the GigaSpaces blog for various updates on product releases, events and other stuff.

So this is my new blogging home from now on. It will serve as a platform from which I can share my thoughts about technology in general as well as things that we're doing specifically at GigaSpaces.

Much of the GigaSpaces product evolution is a result of dialog with our customers, as well as the community at large. During the past few months I've had many discussions with various folks who are active in the developer community, such as John Davies, who was the first to introduce me to Spring, as well as Rod Johnson from Interface21 and Ross Mason from MuleSource. These discussions have been extremely helpful in shaping up many of my ideas on how GigaSpaces can fit with the various industry trends. In recent years I have also had the honor of working closely with Andy Doddington and Yuri Schimke from Bank of America, who have been particularly proactive about their work with GigaSpaces and its integration with Spring, you can learn more about that project here. Frank Greco has been a great supporter of Jini and JavaSpaces for years, and has helped a great deal in educating the market on the technology and how it could fit as an SOA platform in the financial world. This is just a partial list of the many great supporters who have influenced GigaSpaces' roadmap.

My hope for this blog is to continue this level of dialog with a broad group of thought leaders in the community. I'm hoping that  it will evolve as a platform for generating constructive dialog, some of which will probably find its way in the solution we will be providing.

Oh, and as promised - below is the list of the GigaSpaces bloggers who will be now covered in the GigaSpaces blog.

• Geva Perry - Chief Marketing Officer
• Guy Nirpaz - EVP R&D
• Owen Taylor - Senior Director, Worldwide Technical Communications
• Guy Korland - R&D Team Leader
• Shay Banon - System Architect