TIBCO ActiveSpaces
There is increasing pressure on IT to reduce reliance on costly transactional systems and to process increasing streams of data and events in real time.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces™ provides an infrastructure for building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed applications. It combines the features and performance of databases, caching systems, and messaging software to support very large, highly volatile data sets and event-driven applications. It enables organizations to off-load transaction-heavy systems and allows developers to concentrate on business logic rather than the complexities of distributing, scaling, and making applications autonomously fault-tolerant.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is a distributed peer-to-peer in-memory data grid, a form of virtual shared memory that leverages a distributed hash table with configurable replication. This approach means the capacity of the space scales automatically as nodes join and leave. Replication assures fault-tolerance from node failure as the space autonomously re-replicates and re-distributes lost data.
- Provides lower cost of management by off-loading slow, expensive, and hard to maintain transactional-based back-end systems.
- Delivers ultra-low and predictable latency as all communication is done peer-to-peer without the intervention of a central server.
- Enables data virtualization, so developers can focus on business logic rather than details of data implementation.
- Enables the creation of next-generation elastic applications including high performance computing, eXtreme Transaction Processing, and complex event processing.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is a distributed peer-to-peer in-memory data grid that enables heterogeneous applications to share, exchange, and process data in real time.
Key Features
- Simple Administration: TIBCO ActiveSpaces eliminates the complexity of implementing and configuring a distributed caching platform. Developers can create, manage, and deploy applications without the complex configurations files. Replication, distribution, and fault tolerance are done automatically by the space. A command line administration tool provides an interactive, text-based interface for configuration and management that can also be run remotely. Shell-like control keys provide command history, syntax completion, and context-sensitive help.
- Elastic Scalability: Nodes, applications, and machines contributing storage and computing resources can be added and removed from the metaspace on the fly. Space scales linearly as nodes join and leave. A distributed hashing algorithm minimally redistributes data as topology changes.
- Platform Independent: Stores database rows and objects and can be used as middleware to exchange information between heterogeneous platforms.
- Active-Active Fault Tolerance: ActiveSpaces uses a peer-to-peer distribution algorithm to provide fault tolerance to the collective space. The algorithm not only determines which cluster member is responsible for the original storage of the data, but determines which node is responsible for the second degree, etc., resulting in an active-active fault tolerance architecture without the resource overhead.
- Distributed Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure: TIBCO ActiveSpaces uses a specific group membership protocol and does not rely on a central administration server to coordinate communication among peers. This improves latency and efficiency within a collective space.
Common Use Cases
- Distributed Data Cache: Create large virtual data caches from the aggregate memory of participating nodes.
- Real-Time Database: Speed up access to operational data by creating in-memory distributed databases.
- Space-Based Architecture: Leverage the distributed in-memory tuple space implementation to support the coordination and communication of loosely coupled processing units.
- Grid Computing: Solve large problems more quickly and elastically utilize available resources by using ActiveSpaces for grid computing.
