The application server vendor is offering GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform that allows apps such as analytics, transactional and hosted software to fully milk the resources that Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems (UCS) offers, said Nati Shalom, chief technology officer with GigaSpaces Technologies. “Existing applications will not be able to run on these types of boxes because most of them are bounded by disk or by database access,” said Shalom.
The platform, he explained, allows apps to run on in-memory and not disk, thereby increasing utilization of the hardware’s resources—cores, memory—and bettering performance to something like 300,000 operations per second over the network or seven million within the platform, according to Shalom.
The pre-integrated offering plugs into customers’ existing UCS blades, an automated deployment made possible with Cisco’s APIs.
Shalom goes on to claim that GigaSpaces offering is superior to Oracle’s Exalogic because the latter is hindered by being disk-based. “(It) needs a lot of expensive hardware to get the same level of utilization that we’re getting with a much smaller footprint … because we are completely in-memory versus their stack with is completely disk,” said Shalom.
Dave Pearson, senior analyst with Toronto-based IDC Canada Ltd., said that while GigaSpaces offers some valuable features, the resultant impact right now on the Canadian market won’t be tremendous given the limited penetration that UCS has made. “If they’re banking on that to be pulling them into our market with many, many implementations, that’s not likely to be the case in the near term,” said Pearson.
That said, Pearson thinks GigaSpaces’ claim that its offering performs better than Oracle’s Exalogic has a bit of truth to it, however, Exalogic can also handle in-memory-based apps. “Exalogic can do pure in-memory apps with it as well but not at the same scale,” said Pearson.
GigaSpaces is targeting two types of enterprise customers. Those using Cisco’s UCS but having trouble porting apps to the platform. And those who find themselves running out of compute capacity and must move from a disk to in-memory-based approach.
“With the likes of UCS, they can put all the data in memory, terabytes of the data and not just a portion of the data,” said Shalom.
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