GigaSpaces - Powering Web 2.0

A couple of months ago, when we launched the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program, Chris Kanaracus of IDG wrote a piece titled GigaSpaces Targets the 'Digg Effect', which was published in InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld and a couple of other IDG publications.

The title was about the fact that many Web 2.0 companies face a situation where they may encounter a huge traffic increase if, for example, they get Digged or Slashdotted or Endgadgeted or Gizmodoed. GigaSpaces provides a scale-out application platform, that among other things, can address exactly that situation. In other words, if you need to scale, all you have to do is throw in more commodity servers -- no changes to the architecture or code -- and very little configuration changes.

Well, on Friday I received an email that made my day (week? month? year?) -- and made the title of Chris's story a lot more meaningful. Amnon Sarig, CEO of our customer TuneWiki, sent us this (published with permission):

Hi Yaron, Nati, Geva, Victoria,  

Google ‘TuneWiki’.  You’ll see what you helped unleash. Nothing short of changing the way humanity wants their music served  - in two years time, it will be a God given right for consumers to have the lyrics with the music. We planned for 5,000 users in the first week of beta -- we have tens of thousands jumping on us in days.

We are at the moment totally overwhelming the bandwidth allocated for our beta test. We made the mistake of releasing an update after one week of beta test, fixing all the major points the community asked us for. In one week we collected tens of thousands of users – looks like every one of them tried to upgrade at the same time.

Go ahead, write your case study on how your technology and  GridDynamics magic increased our capacity from 5 million streams to 250 million streams per day. Ask me whatever ‘business’ notes you need.

Thank you all for helping us.

Amnon.

First of all, congrats to Amnon and his team. You need to check out what TuneWiki is all about and a good place to start is this Gizmodo review. If you've ever wished you could see the lyrics of a song you're listening to on the fly, look no further.

Second of all, hello?! How fun is it to get this kind of email from a customer? (and equally as fun that the customer allows you to make it public).

One last thing: in his email, Amnon refers to "GridDynamics magic". GridDynamics is a GigaSpaces partner, headed by Victoria Livschitz, that has been doing tremendous work around our product. Check out their web site and the very cool projects they are working on in their blog, including the GigaPult project and the GigaSpaces Maven Archetype. All of these (and another project called Convergence - will explain in a future post) -- as well as projects from other GigaSpaces customers, partners and employees -- will be available on OpenSpaces.org when we officially launch it later this month. In the meantime, you can read up on the various projects here.