Welcome to the ScaleOut Software blog on real-time analytics. We will strive to give you insights into our technology and why it matters to your application development. We will look behind the curtain to explain design tradeoffs that may not be obvious from the product descriptions and programming guides. Lastly, we will try to put all this into perspective as we explore with you the latest trends in real-time analytics and in-memory computing.

New C++ APIs

We introduced ScaleOut StateServer® almost exactly nine years ago and have worked continuously since then to add features requested by our customers and boost the product’s performance. Version 5.1 contains several exciting new capabilities, led by our introduction of C++ APIs. Our goal was to make these C++ APIs as easy to use as possible. So the first decision was to make them open source. This allows developers to build the APIs for a variety of compilers starting with GCC 4.4 (circa 2009) and newer. To strike a balance that allows support for the older compilers used on some enterprise-grade distributions of Linux, some newer C++11 features were not used, and the APIs use the widely-available Boost C++ libraries instead. (Releases of Boost going back to version 1.41 have been verified to work.) So, for example, rather than returning a std::shared_ptr to a retrieved object, the API returns a boost::shared_ptr. The C++ APIs are also available for Windows developers; we ship pre-built libraries for Visual Studio 2013 users in the release.

The next big challenge with the C++ APIs was how to handle data serialization, which is needed to store objects within an out-of-process, in-memory data grid (IMDG). We first introduced C# APIs in 2005, and then added Java APIs in 2008. Unlike C++, both of these languages have built-in serializers; ScaleOut StateServer uses these serializers by default to keep application development as simple for the user as possible. Looking at other IMDGs in the market, we did not want to go down the same path of requiring the use of serialization APIs provided by the IMDG vendor (us in this case). So we chose to offer integrated support for the popular Google Protocol Buffer encoding standard (with optional indexing of annotated fields to support parallel query) and also provide an extensible API mechanism that allows users to build custom serializers.

Replicating Data to the Cloud

With version 5.1, we also extended support for data replication and remote access to IMDGs hosted in public clouds using our ScaleOut GeoServer® product. This product lets users connect a local IMDG to one or more remote IMDGs so that data can be replicated off-site in case of a site-wide failure; it also allows transparent access to data stored at remote sites using the IMDG’s APIs for local data access. With this release, remote IMDGs hosted in Amazon Web Services or Windows Azure can be accessed by ScaleOut GeoServer (and by client applications) with full support for secure connections using SSL.

The challenge with accessing cloud-based IMDGs is that it is clumsy to bootstrap connectivity using IP addresses, as is standard practice for on-premise grids, since these IP addresses are highly dynamic. To solve this problem, we created a simple mechanism (first introduced in version 5.0 for remote clients) which binds clients and remote IMDGs to a cloud-hosted IMDG using a simple combination of account credentials and a “store” name. We then retrieve cloud-based metadata to automatically identify and configure the current IP addresses and ports for the client or remote IMDG. The net effect is that configuring ScaleOut GeoServer to access a cloud-hosted IMDG is simple and secure.

Real-Time Hadoop MapReduce for Windows

With 5.1, we also rolled out the Windows version of our ScaleOut hServer® product, which lets developers create and run Hadoop MapReduce applications on grid-based data. This enables analysis of “live”, fast-changing data held within the IMDG, and it also delivers real-time results in milliseconds to a few seconds (instead of the minutes to hours required by standard, open source Hadoop distributions). Now users can run ScaleOut hServer on both Linux and Windows. We also added support for the Cloudera CDH4 Hadoop APIs to supplement support for the Apache Hadoop 1.X APIs.

Eliminating Network Bottlenecks

Some of the most exciting enhancements in version 5.1 deal with the internal architecture of ScaleOut’s IMDG. Over the last nine years, we have watched advances in CPU, memory, and networking technology. Unfortunately, these advances occur at different times and put stress in varying parts of the IMDG’s architecture. Today’s IMDGs often are deployed on clusters of servers each with 32 GB memory or higher (instead of 2 GB, which was common in 2005) and 8 or more i7 or Xeon cores. However, network bandwidth has only jumped 10X to 1 Gbps from 100 Mbps since 2005, while 10 Gbps Ethernet and Infiniband await widespread adoption in clusters of commodity servers. The net effect is that IMDG applications can easily saturate a gigabit network as servers are added to the cluster, especially when large objects are stored.

To help address this, we have streamlined the IMDG’s internal transport protocol used for load-balancing to boost its effective throughput by as much as 5X. This allows load-balancing to complete much faster after a server is added or removed from the IMDG.

Detecting Failures in Virtualized Environments

Another big technology change we have seen over the last nine years is the migration to virtualized environments; many if not most of our customer deployments are now hosted on virtual servers. Because it’s all too easy to overload the underlying physical servers with too many VMs, we often see intermittent network or processing delays caused by maxing out the CPU and NIC and sometimes by paging grid-hosted memory. These transient delays make it difficult to build a reliable heart-beating mechanism to recognize and recover from server or network outages (by looking for missing heartbeat messages between servers). Version 5.0 incorporated an adaptive heart-beating mechanism that responded to intermittent delays but could be spoofed by the unpredictable behavior of virtualized systems.

We now have fully revised this mechanism with new heuristics that more effectively identify and ignore these transient delays. ScaleOut StateServer measures the network for a full 24 hours before tightening its parameters for treating a heartbeat delay as a real outage, and it fully re-measures the network after a failure is detected. (Because it’s important to handle real outages quickly, allowed heartbeat delays must be kept as short as possible.) Our tests show that this approach minimizes service interruptions caused by erratic delays endemic to virtualized environments. However, it’s important to note that because of its heuristic nature, heart-beating can interpret communication delays as server failures.

We hope this tour of version 5.1 has helped illustrate our ongoing goals to maximize both ease of use and application performance, two core objectives of our IMDG and analytics technology. Please let us know your thoughts and comments.