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October 29, 2007
Balancing Peformance and Simplicity for Wall Street
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Designed with Simplicity in Mind
Although the financial services industry is known for its early adoption of cutting-edge technologies – a task made easier by the high skill level of many of the industry’s IT personnel – even the most advanced users appreciate simplicity as they begin to expand their use of distributed computing beyond its traditional HPC realm and expose it to a more mainstream pool of developers and system architects.
In this regard, some would say it doesn’t get much better than GigaSpaces, whose version 6.0 technology, dubbed eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), has been designed with developer friendliness and ease of use as top priorities. Said GigaSpaces chief marketing officer Geva Perry, the company took a traditional programmer’s point of view when developing the new solution, which means no new APIs or programming models. Instead, thanks to its use of the Spring Framework, application writing on the GigaSpaces platform is transparent, with developers basically just writing Java, .NET, C++, or whatever code they prefer.
Perry hopes this will help open the doors to a wider audience whose members don’t necessarily have the unique skills of the Wall Street crowd. “They’re the smartest guys in the industry that you will find as developer and architects; they can … wrap their heads around [high technology],” he said. “I don’t think that in financial services we need to do much more as vendors for increased adoption.”
Of course, as noted earlier, it isn’t just the distributed computing masterminds who are working with these technologies nowadays. According to Marc Jacobs, a director at financial services application developer Lab49, most of the non-specialists to whom he has spoken are just coming to terms with distributed computing techniques, so the easier the better. They just want to “take [an] app that’s already written in serial mode, tweak it, do a couple of things to it and get it distributed,” and GigaSpaces makes this a reality.
Another element of simplicity is holism, and this is another area where GigaSpaces excels. XAP innately handles data, business logic and messaging, which leads to one of, if not the, most complete solutions on the market. Perry is quick to point out, however, that GigaSpaces’ application platform is not just an amalgamation of parts sewn together, but rather a product of a different approach. The company’s founders and chief technologists thought about the problem “like computer scientists” trying to design a solution from scratch (as opposed simply trying to improve upon existing solutions) and the resulting core technology yields a single product instead of one big product that is really three components.
Jacobs appreciates the holistic qualities of the GigaSpaces platform, as well -- especially its distributed caching and automation capabilities. Competitive solutions handling business logic, for example, suffer from not having a distributed cache. As for automation, Jacobs likes the how abstraction XAP creates allows developers to write objects and dump them into a distributed cloud, then simply call the methods on the objects and have them distributed across multiple machines. Developers also can combine the data cache along with a mechanism for scheduling method calls on different machines.
Nevertheless, and although he believes the company is leading the pack in terms of including a collection of technologies and features that are “destined to all come together,” Jacobs acknowledges that the GigaSpaces platform does have its setbacks. In fact, if asked everyone’s favorite clichéd interview question, he might well suggest GigaSpaces respond with everyone’s favorite clichéd response: “My biggest fault? Probably that I try too hard.” In Jacobs’ opinion, GigaSpaces is guilty of “going for reach rather than polish” by continuing to add new features instead of refining its existing pieces. He also thinks the company might have bound its hands by sticking with the JavaSpaces API on which it is built. That standard, he noted, is not really designed to handle everything GigaSpaces is trying to do, and the end result is a product that feels “a bit kludged.”
In addition, Jacobs said that the “people who write the checks” care more about the management side of things than developer simplicity (“They care more about security than they care about a good API.”), and GigaSpaces is relatively weak on that end when compared to solutions from vendors like Platform Computing that contain very rich management and security capabilities.
For his part, GigaSpaces’ Perry doesn’t delineate so clearly the line between his company and the Platforms of the world. From GigaSpaces’ perspective, its product works very well as a complement to the traditional, industrial-strength grid platforms – they handle resource coordination and big batch jobs, and XAP handles the real-time, data-intensive applications. GigaSpaces already has partnered with Platform and DataSynapse, and is working closely with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems to increase interoperability with Windows Compute Cluster Server and Sun Grid Engine.
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