GigaSpaces White Paper

From the Introduction . . .

Tier-based computing has hit a wall when it comes to supporting performance-intensive applications. Whether the challenge is to grow these applications beyond a few hundred concurrent users or a few dozen parallel processes, issues like complexity, scalability, load-balancing, and synchronicity get in the way. The solution is not to improve the tier-based approach but to move beyond it. -- to a service oriented architecture built on shared services within a grid computing framework.

The power of spaces comes from not having to separate various parts of an application into discrete physical runtimes -- and then wiring those together in complex, hard-to-scale, and performance-consuming tangles of middleware. A space doesn't care if an application has been 'tiered." Whether it has or not, the same program code will instantiate multiple times on the same machine or on multiple machines automatically -- and even dynamically -- in response to runtime parameters like CPU utilization.

Instances communicate through the space, just as if they were talking to middleware. In fact, they can use the same middleware APIs they always have -- except now the middleware's role has become virtualized, meaning that all physical message and data exchanges are handled transparently by the space.

And here's the best part: Spaces make migrating today's tier-based applications to tomorrow's service oriented and grid architectures an evolutionary migration -- with immediate performance boosting benefits. Very often a good place to start is with distributed data caching . . .

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