GigaSpaces Technologies, a pioneer of next-generation application platforms for mission-critical applications, is introducing a new solution for replicating data over a WAN using the GigaSpaces market-leading in-memory data grid and scaling technology.
“All enterprise IT organizations are concerned with replicating mission-critical data across sites, applications, or data centers for various purposes, such as disaster recovery and geographically distributed operations. The challenges they face are not insignificant – data must be kept consistent no matter how large the volumes being handled, without affecting performance, while zero-downtime and security are non-negotiable,” says Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO. “GigaSpaces Multi-Site Data Replication provides the means to synchronize data across the enterprise, in an extremely simple and reliable way.”
The GigaSpaces Multi-Site Data Replication technology uses GigaSpaces’ in-memory data grid (IMDG) to ensure superb performance. While no disk access is involved, the data is highly available and there is no risk of data loss. The system enables easy scaling by adding partitions and distributing its gateway across several hosts.
Data replication using the GigaSpaces solution works in three easy steps: Data is mirrored to the GigaSpaces data grid using standard APIs; replication gateways are configured; and then, gateways are deployed at each site, enabling sites to bootstrap remotely without introducing data consistency issues. This means that once your data is stored in the GigaSpaces IMDG, replicating it across the WAN is merely a matter of adjusting some configuration files.
The GigaSpaces Multi-Site Data Replication solution is especially effective for the following use cases:
- Disaster Recovery: Any mission-critical system must have a disaster recovery environment in a remote data center. GigaSpaces data replication ensures that data is always up to date at both sites, so that it is possible to continue from an exact point of failure. Unlike database replication solutions that are limited to read-only synchronization, GigaSpaces replication supports Active/Active sites, ensuring maximum utilization when both sites are active.
- Multi-Site Operations: Large sites often serve users across geographies. To ensure consistently low latency, it is common to maintain a copy of the data close to the users in each location. The content delivery network (CDN) handles the distribution of static data. GigaSpaces data replication handles the synchronization of the dynamic data across sites.
- Integration of Data Across Applications: Enterprises often run multiple applications that use the same data. Rather than sharing data between applications in batch mode, which bears a cost in terms of expense and accuracy, GigaSpaces data replication gives businesses real-time access to up-to-date information for all their applications.
- Cloudbursting: Cloudbursting is economically appealing to enterprises that want to increase capacity on demand using the public cloud pay-per-use model rather than investing in additional on-premise computing resources. True cloudbursting requires the ability to burst both processes and their associated data. The GigaSpaces replication solution provides a secure private data cloud between the primary data center and the remote site. Processes can be spawned quickly when needed and get local access to their data.
“Part of the GigaSpaces vision is making it easy to resolve tomorrow’s technology challenges today,” says Shalom. “Our Multi-Site Data Replication technology is a perfect example of this – we have built into the technology all the most advanced features, such as data filtering, transactionality, management and monitoring, high availability and self-healing, and more… But for the enterprise, the whole process is completed with just a few clicks.”