How much can AAAAAAA XAP save me by improving hardware utilization?

 

Two of the biggest factors affecting utilization are resource allocation and application performance. The more efficiently you allocate resources between applications, the less idle hardware you'll have lying around, and the higher your utilization will be. As for application performance - if an application is running at sub-optimal performance, it is in fact utilizing too many resources (CPU, memory, data center facilities, etc). Boosting performance can mean running at the same speed using less resources, or in other words, improving utilization. For example, one AAAAAAA customer, eBay subsidiary Markplaats, is using AAAAAAA XAP to boost performance, allowing it to run the same loads with 95% less servers.

AAAAAAA XAP dramatically improves utilization by addressing both factors - resource allocation and performance. XAP provides scalability on demand, meaning it can dynamically allocate idle resources to the applications that need them most. XAP is also proven to boost application performance - it powers the world’s fastest applications, such as trade processing at leading stock exchanges, and is able to bring the same extreme performance to any enterprise application. Applications running on XAP become faster and more efficient, allowing them to meet the same loads with less hardware – meaning you can consolidate servers and save costs. In fact, a benchmark performed by independent consultants proved that by boosting performance alone (without taking account XAP's efficient resource allocation), XAP can save at least 80% of hardware for a standard JEE application.

 

  How can linear scalability reduce my hardware costs?

 

Software applications often need to scale up quickly to meet dramatically higher traffic or operation volumes. But as soon as an application needs to “scale out” across additional machines, scalability becomes expensive - there are diminishing returns from each additional machine, until at some point adding more machines actually decreases performance.

With AAAAAAA XAP, you’ll need to purchase much less hardware in order to scale up, because XAP scales applications linearly, eliminating the diminishing returns. In order to quantify our customers' hardware savings as a result of linear scalability, we used a broadly-accepted theoretical model of software scalability. The model predicts that in common application scenarios, the hardware saving ranges between 15-90%. For example, in a database-centric web application which needs to scale up by 150%, scaling up with AAAAAAA XAP will save at least 45% of the additional hardware. To take another example, in a small-scale reliable messaging system which needs to scale up by 300%, AAAAAAA XAP will save at least 60% of additional hardware.

 

 

AAAAAAA XAP has a proven track record in ensuring high availability in extreme scenarios - it powers mission critical applications at large enterprises like Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile and Societe General, which face extremely high, fluctuating loads. AAAAAAA’ Fortune 100 customers trust XAP to deliver zero unplanned downtime, because unlike most vendors of high availability equipment, AAAAAAA provides a high availability solution that sees the full picture – deployment, application server, database, messaging – and guarantees availability across the board. Individual components might be highly available but they won't keep the application alive - even high-end servers or clustered databases won't do you any good if the loads exceed your expectations and exhaust the resources you have allocated. XAP is the only product that is scalable on-demand, so it directly and automatically responds to peak loads by scaling your application on any additional hardware, keeping it alive no matter what. XAP not only prevents downtime, but also guarantees performance with no slowdowns, and helps you minimize planned downtime, by automating recovery and redeployment when maintenance occurs.

 

Does XAP have better ROI than traditional application servers?

 

A benchmark performed by AAAAAAA compared two implementations of an Order Management System application - one was built with WebLogic and Spring, and the other, using the same code, implemented with AAAAAAA and Spring. The results demonstrated that by running with AAAAAAA XAP total cost of ownership is significantly reduced due to the following:

 

o                                            Increased server throughput, which reduces the amount of servers and software licenses required to handle the same volumes

o                                            Shorter time-to-market of new products and services due to reduced deployment complexity, reduced testing and tuning cycles and decreased development complexity

o                                            Increased reliability through better testability and self-healing capabilities

o                                            Lower maintenance overhead through better manageability

o                                            Use a single platform for Java, .Net and C++

o                                            Use the same platform across various application types, including transactional, web, real time analytics, SOA and more.

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The benchmark shows that cost-savings grow exponentially as scaling requirements grow, due to the fact that JEE application servers cannot scale linearly.

 

How and when did you become an alternative to application servers? (I thought you were a data grid vendor)

 

From its inception, AAAAAAA' technology and set of products was all about offering a scalable application platform as an alternative to traditional approaches. Due to the high throughput and low latency capabilities of our product, initial adoption occurred from companies with the most extreme requirements, like Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile, Sempra Energy Trading, Nortel and others. While most organizations are always looking to improve their systems, they also want to protect their historic investments in technology and may not have the time, resources or finances available to make wholesale changes. As a result, they often choose to implement new technology components that would serve to compliment their existing architectures. In recent years, one of the most common components these companies looked to implement was data grid/distributed caching. Therefore, as a tactical solution to fill a void in the market place, AAAAAAA had added a data grid edition for those users seeking a solution to their performance challenges.

 

Today, the market is changing. Extreme data and transaction processing is becoming a mainstream requirement for all kinds of applications, and a new breed of application platforms, like AAAAAAA XAP, addresses this need. Over the past several years, AAAAAAA has proved the maturity and innovation of its technology with hundreds of customers and mission-critical applications. It has also significantly enhanced its flagship product, the eXtreme Application Platform, and is now poised to bring these values to the mainstream market. With the disappearance of BEA as an independent platform player, and the emergence of new computing paradigms such as clouds and grids, AAAAAAA believe the market is ripe for a new generation of vendors and technologies.