I had few discussions in the past week with people who asked me about our recent GoGrid announcement and how our cloud offering integrates with the GoGrid environment. I’ll try to answer the most frequently asked questions below. In addition, we’re conducting a webinar where you can ask your specific questions online and watch a live demo – see details at the bottom of this post.
What is the GigaSpaces cloud offering?
GigaSpaces provides a set of cloud-enabled middleware services, namely data grid, messaging and Map/Reduce. These are equivalent to the Amazon SimpleDB, SQS and Map/Reduce, with the the main difference being that it’s implemented entirely in-memory and designed to support existing enterprise applications. On top of that GigaSpaces provides integration of those services into a Platform as a Service solution designed to make the deployment of JEE/Spring or XAP-based applications extremely simple.
What makes it enterprise ready?
Most enterprise applications are based on standard JEE or .Net platforms. In addition, all enterprise applications are transactional in nature and cannot tolerate any potential inconsistency. Enterprise applications are more sensitive to performance and latency. Our cloud-enabled middleware supports all these requirements. It was designed to leverage memory resources to gain the best performance and latency, and supports large-scale deployments from the get-go. It is based on XAP, which is a mature product with hundreds of deployments in the most mission-critical applications.
What makes your middleware cloud-enabled?
GigaSpaces supports all the key characteristics expected from cloud-enabled middleware, as defined by Gartner below:
How is it different than traditional middleware?
With GigaSpaces all middleware services run on a shared pool of resources. GigaSpaces provides a high level of security to ensure complete isolation between multiple applications. The deployment, provisioning and monitoring is completely automated.
Can your middleware seamlessly shrink and grow dynamically when a machine joins or leave the network?
Yes – let me explain:
There are three components that makes our middleware elastic and thus suitable for a dynamic environment:
- Service automation and administration – this part takes care of moving the middleware and application services around based on machine, memory, and CPU utilization.
- Common clustering and state management – this part makes sure that nothing breaks when you start to move around any of the applications or middleware services.
- API Facade – this part provides a standard interface as well as language binding, for seamless access from existing applications.
What does the integration with GoGrid include?
The integration includes the ability to use any of the middleware services (data-grid, messaging and Map/Reduce), either individually or integrated with our PaaS solution.
Can I use it if I'm not running on GigaSpaces XAP?
Yes. Users can leverage the GigaSpaces images to get deployment automation and improved management for their existing application, as well as add auto scaling and high availability.
What is unique about the GoGrid cloud offering?
For GigaSpaces users, the main things that you’ll find useful in the GoGrid environment are as follows:
- Enable custom deployment – GoGrid enables enterprise users to customize their environment to fit their specific enterprise standard. This include VPN, network as well as machine hardware configuration if required.
- Native multicast support – makes cluster deployment simple.
- Standard database storage support – makes database high availability simple.
For GigaSpaces windows/.Net users, you’ll find the following useful:
- Built-in .Net support
- Support for Windows and SQL Server 2008
- GoGrid have the same pricing for 64/32 bit
When can I try the GoGrid integration?
The GigaSpaces/GoGrid solution is currently available for limited set of users. Public availability is expected within a month. If you’re interested in early access, or want to be notified when the images will be publicly available, please send an email to <cloud at gigaspaces dot com>.
Is there a live demonstration?
To see a live demonstration, you should register to the Enterprise-Grade Cloud Platform with XAP and GoGrid webinar that will take place on October 14 at 9:00 AM PDT.
