GigaSpaces Announces the Release of XAP 7.1

New generation application platform provider, GigaSpaceshas released version 7.1 of the eXtreme Application Platform "XAP." This latest version is designed to automatically implement dynamic scalability and multi-tenancy, based on an organization's individual business requirements.

With such development, XAP significantly simplifies development, deployment and operations while also enabling enterprises to maximize utilization of modern IT resources with no change to the way the company operates.

Company Benefits

XAP 7.1 delivers significant benefits to the company, especially in maintaining SLAs during production. The platform does everything necessary to continue meeting business requirements. If an existing machine exhausts its resources or fails, when loads change or if machines are added, XAP automatically adjusts the cluster and rebalances the application.

"We have always delivered reliable technology that guarantees dynamic scalability and high availability with millisecond latency," said Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO, in a statement. "Now we are simplifying operations for developers and administrators. With each new generation, we focus on features that most benefit the enterprise's bottom line."

The latest version of XAP offers a simplified API for the Elastic Data Grid that streamlines development and operations. Once users input their business requirements, XAP deploys and configures the data grid cluster automatically, thereby saving substantial effort and cost typically involved in sizing, hardware provisioning and configuring distributed middleware.

Efficiency and Simplification in Development

Version 7.1 also significantly simplifies development and provides better isolation among multiple users and independent life cycle management for each tenant with its built-in multi-tenancy. With the Elastic Data Grid, one simple parameter defines the isolation level, thereby allowing for a variety of configurations or sharing everything among everyone.
 

Increased efficiencies driven by the 7.1 version will result in cost savings for the company. With concurrent transaction management for improved utilization of multi-core processors, improving on multicore utilization to return up to 300 percent performance improvement on the Intel (News - Alert) Nehalem processor.

Cost Savings

"Enterprises perpetually need to reduce costs and optimize utilization of hardware and software resources," says Massimo Pezzini of Gartner (News - Alert). "They look for application platform technology providing elasticity, 'continuous' availability as well as automatic deployment and scaling of applications, while reducing administration burdens."

The XAP in general is estimated to save 15-90 percent of hardware costs when scaling up due to its inherent linear scalability. The platform runs on 80 percent less hardware by boosting performance, as the standard J2EEE applications run 500 percent faster when powered by XAP. The platform also cuts development costs and saves the cost of unplanned downtime.
 

According to GigaSpace officials, "XAP continuously monitors the deployment to ensure service levels are met, automatically adding resources if necessary. Users do not have to manually intervene to make sure there is enough computing power or memory; meanwhile companies are able to save the enormous cost of downtime, estimated by IDC (News - Alert) at $8,000 per server per year."

For Developers

From a development standpoint, developers can treat the middleware as a black-box as they do not need to have expertise in middleware in general or even the GigaSpaces platform. This makes for easier development, easier deployment and easier maintenance as no code changes are required.

The new platform is certified for use with Cisco (News - Alert) UCS, forming a cluster that reaches a memory capacity of several terabytes with massive computing power. This combination offers a full, scalable stack to enable the deployment in one API call for even the largest in-memory operations.

So, what does this release mean for the market? According to GigaSpaces: XAP provides the platform required today and tomorrow -- a platform that manages data in-memory and can exploit fast networks and multi-cores through a combination of scale-out and scale-up patterns. XAP supports virtualization and multi-tenancy, ensuring these powerful new resources can be shared across the data center.