GEMFIRE FOR DEFENSE AND INTELLIGENCE

The U.S. Government is the largest and most widely distributed, producer and consumer of Real-Time, Mission Critical Information. Military, public safety and security organizational missions depend upon ultra fast and reliable access to operational data. Exclusively focused on in-memory data management and distribution, GemStone is in an excellent position to support our Public Sector prospect and customers missions to:

• Provide Data Awareness
• Support Disconnected Operations and Distressed Networks
• Increase Performance, Reduce Application Footprint
• Real Time view of operational data

Data Awareness

Arguably one of the most significant developments in the history of data management came with the invention of the relational database (circa early 1970’s). With traditional database access, queries are run against the database, result sets are returned, and work then begins from the returned information.

If new data arrives in the database a microsecond later that would have changed the results set, life is tough. You work with the data you have and maybe synchronize with the database before you finish your analysis, planning, or other work. But once again, the data could change right after you finish. What can you do?

If only the database could call you back, based on your query and show the data changes that would have caused that query to have a different result set.

With GemFire, that is exactly what happens. GemFire’s Continuous Query acts like a tap on the shoulder to alert people when queries they made have changed results. See Next Generation Data Management for more details.

GemFire’s Data Awareness capability is used in such real world applications as the GCCS-J 4.2 for Situational Awareness, program stock trading and real time business intelligence at major financial institutions such as Fidelity, JP Morgan, and Merrill Lynch.

Disconnected, Intermittent, and Limited Bandwidth (DIL)

• GemFire enables the creation of applications that work both in garrison and in the field. It has built in support for applications that are not always on the network and/or need to work over distressed networks. During the Trident Warrior military exercise the Navy experienced a 90% reduction in the bandwidth used by a Command and Control (C2) application on a ship built on GemFire versus the previous version which was not built on GemFire. Additionally, that ship experienced a network outage, during which the application continued to function (although it did not receive new data). When the network was functioning again, the ship received new data and the latest update for each piece of stale data.

Performance

• Customers experience applications that run 4 to 10 times faster on the average
  • Speeds online transaction processing and analysis systems in the financial industry by as much as factor of 10
  • Speeds up complex long running scientific computing jobs on a data grid
  • Order of Battle data access for complex unit subordination sped up data access times from previous two to twenty minutes (depending on the size of the nations forces) to sub-second.
• Reduce application footprints – instead of running faster shrink footprint
  • Instead of running an application faster, that speed can be used to run the application on less CPU’s, and less database resources. In turn that often means reduced costs for other software licenses. Overall the result is a significant savings in cost, and power to deploy a system. With today’s edge environments stressed for electricity, GemFire can help address that issue. It also supports the green initiatives in government.

Many customers experience all three of these benefits all in the same application. The Global Command and Control Systems new Common Operating Picture application, Agile Client, uses GemFire to provide high performance service oriented architecture, where users can dynamically subscribe to near real-time track management data from multiple sources, and view that data live on 3-D or 2D surface. Agile Client enables data fusion from multiple sources. It supports DIL environments. GemFire provided Agile Client the software infrastructure to accomplish all of this faster, with more scalability, cheaper (in total resources, in time, and in supportability), and more effectively than any other choice the customer analyzed.
For more information about our work with GCCS-J, please consider the following press release: GemStone to Speed Data Distribution and Analysis for Defense Information Systems Agency

Unified Data Access

• Wall Street customers have some of the largest private compute clouds in the world. For many of these customers these compute clouds run across multiple data centers around the world for both global data visibility and for high availability. Using GemFire, these customers not only experienced a large increase in performance but also were able to provide multiple applications a secured, shared data view. Additionally, they gained a near-real time fail-over and recover center.

In the defense and intelligence sector, we’ve demonstrated that GemFire provides four fundamental virtues: Data Awareness, Support Disconnected Operations and Distressed Networks Increase Performance, Reduce Application Footprint and Real Time view of operational data. In essence, GemFire was able to pull in all the data streams produced by the military, manage that data in-memory so DISA’s GCCS-J application could provide a window into that data for the military and achieve all of this with guaranteed low-latency, fault tolerance and high throughput. Additionally we’ve shown that GemFire can provide a unified view of data across datacenters with high throughput and low latency. Our work in both defense and intelligence and financial services has proven that GemFire is, indeed, the next generation data management platform.