UPDATED 08:15 EDT / JANUARY 31 2011

GigaSpaces’ New Cloud Scalability Supports Most APIs

GigaSpaces is adding to its cloud management services, launching the eXtreme Application Platform (XAP 8.0) today.  It’s based on the ideals of openness, designed to help businesses scale up and out.  It’s a centralized management tool, taking GigaSpaces further into the realm of unified communications efforts, harping on a core issue with current cloud management solutions, which are often mashups of various products, leading to compatibility issues all their own.

XAP 8.0 offers interoperability amongst all common interfaces for accessing data, meaning you can choose the best API for your scenario, and know that GigaSpaces supports it.  This resolves issues around different languages and technologies used in cloud products, which is becoming a sticky mess for many IT managers to deal with.

XAP 8.0 even has its own mantra, which reads: “Same Data, Any API.”  This sums it up pretty nicely, as GigaSpaces is looking to provide scaling solutions around unified updates that touch on every tier a business may have in their cloud.  One tier may be for their web app, while another holds their data.  With more data centers emerging, providing localized data, moving it from one drive to another, backing it up and restoring as needed, there’s a great deal to manage when it comes to updating tiers and maintaining the proper web presence.

“It’s all about scaling as a whole, not just the data,” Uri Cohen, Director of Product Management at GigaSpaces explains during an interview.  “All these tiers must work together, processing information at each level.  When you start thinking about scalability, each tier is essentially a different product, with a different scalability model.  You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and focusing on only one tier reveals weaknesses in the others.”

GigaSpaces’ solution is to integrate tier management into a single clustering model, moving beyond the mashup approach.  The company has always had to get creative with its products, finding unique and efficient ways to enable businesses to manage their cloud.  GigaSpaces isn’t the biggest in the industry, so attracting new customers is an entirely different ball game for GigaSpaces, taking client needs into account.

In doing so, GigaSpaces focuses on addressing these needs in an open manner, avoiding many of the pitfalls of its predecessors.  With large vendors like VMware or Oracle, the unified approach consists of multiple company products that may or may not have been optimized to work with each other.  What GigaSpaces is doing with XAP 8.0 is presenting unified scalability across an entire application, managing all included tiers with just one product.

This focus on customer needs and circumventing big vendor concerns comes from that place of creativity, which has forced GigaSpaces to really think about these things from a very early stage.  The concept behind XAP 8.0 is something the company has considered from day one, incorporating a solution into its product lineup even before its time.  It’s GigaSpaces’ competitive edge, lowering apprehension levels in their efforts to attract new clients.
“[XAP 8.0] was already one of our goals, not an afterthought,” Cohen continues.  “So we didn’t have to take several products and tie them together.”  He goes on to liken this methodology to the now-classic example of a PC versus a Mac, where the a la carte menu is often more cost efficient, but Apple’s product goals are incorporated into every step of the design.

Knowing that, we can expect a great deal more services from GigaSpaces in the coming months, as the company is moving towards more custom platform offerings.  Cloud solutions are anything but cookie-cutter, and GigaSpaces will need to continually apply that creative thinking process towards future client management products, especially as the cloud takes in more industries, from healthcare to commerce, gaming and social networking.


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