Saturday, September 16, 2006

GemFire

I am starting an evaluation of object cache technology, starting with GemFire. The target app is a legacy C++ app, so the fact that Gemstone has a C++ version of GemFire is a big plus. They also have .NET bindings, and I will be checking those out too.

One gotcha .... GemFire does not work on Windows 2000 because of the underlying dependencies on 29West's LBM message broker. This is a real nasty if you want to do an evaluation on your desktop at work, but your company is still in Windows 2000-land. So, I had to load up GemFire on my home laptop, which runs XP Pro, and will do the evaluation on my laptop.

The plans are to use the object cache as a "data fabric" in order to speed up some of our calc engines. Object Caches like GigaSpaces are used already in a lot of Wall Street IBs just for that purpose. I have heard a little rumbling about GigaSpace implementations from some former colleagues, so we are hoping that GemFire will be worry-free. Already, I am impressed with their support staff (thanks to Mike and Santiago for timely responses).

I would be interested in comments from any of you people who have evaluated or used object caches in your financial apps, especially C++ or C# apps. Feel free to comment here or email me privately.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

3 comments:

Geva Perry said...

Marc --

I enjoy reading your blog regularly. At GigaSpaces we have many extremely satisfied Wall Street customers, and are happy to refer you to them.

We also have excellent C++ support and can run on Windows 2000.

One more point: although our Caching Edition is popular on Wall Street, we believe that a good distributed caching is only part of the problem of building high-performance, scalable applications and take a hollistic approach to parallel processing, messaging, as well as data caching.

Let me know if you'd like to learn more.

Geva Perry
GigaSpaces

marc said...

Hi Geva,

Well, you never know who is lurking in your blog!

I didn't mean to diss Giga, and I would be happy to talk with you about a possible eval of GigaSpaces. I have never used Giga myself, but I recently have talked to two former colleagues at two different IBs who were running into difficulties with their GigaSpaces implementation. It might not have to do with GigaSpaces at all, but the people doing the actual implementation.

And, I know that GigaSpaces is being used successfully in a number of places in Merrill.

I would be interested to hear how you stack up competitevely against GemFire and the other object caches. I would also be interested to talk to you about our specific need, which is a need that probably many of your customers have had to deal with.

If you send me some email at magmasystems at yahoo dot com, then I will contact you about GigaSpaces. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

I was Involved partyly in GemFire EVAL. It is pretty good.
Their performance is pretty.
At BEAR they are already using for their Algo/Program Trading.

Their product on Linux give very good performance.