Kabira Adds HA to Transaction Software for Solaris, HP-UX

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The real-time, memory-resident transaction processing middleware from Kabira Technologies, which was launched last fall, has just got high availability extensions, the company said. The software is beta testing the HP-UX and Solaris variants of Unix right now and will be integrated into Kabira's Infrastructure System and Transaction Switch by June of this year. That is also when Kabira plans to port its software to another platform that ends in the letter X.

As we detailed in October, the Kabira Infrastructure System is a slightly different concept in middleware and one that San Rafael, California-based Kabira has been working on for eight years. As Paul Sutton, Kabira's CEO explained last fall, Kabira's software is a multifunction middleware suite designed to live in memory--specifically, the giant shared memories of the biggest SMP servers--and to support real-time financial and telecommunications applications. This software is not for everyone (at least not yet, but may be the hallmark of the kind of middleware companies will use a decade from now), so Kabira is focusing on the most demanding online transaction processing jobs. Sutton said that the top 3 percent of applications need to support 100,000 or more users and well over 5,000 transactions per second; and that another 7 percent or so need to process several thousand transactions per second even if they do not support that many concurrent users. And to do so with the current middleware stack--relational databases, Web application servers, transaction monitors, and other enterprise integration middleware that account for 70 percent of the computing work that goes on inside a modern transaction processing system--is very inefficient. And environments that do real-time transaction processing--such as IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) for mainframes or Hewlett-Packard's Zero Latency Environment for its fault-tolerant servers, or beefed up Unix environments to give them fast, reliable transaction processing capabilities--are very expensive.

Last fall, Kabira became much more useful when it moved from 32-bit to 64-bit support for its Infrastructure System middleware on Solaris and HP-UX. Infrastructure System creates a memory-resident, runtime environment for transaction processing that loads data and the compiled code that manipulates that data as part of a transaction into main memory and runs it in main memory. No databases. No Web middleware. No transaction monitor. And that means it is fast. With the Infrastructure System 5.0 release, customers can now hold 1 TB to 2 TB of records in main memory and run transactions against them (this is the limit of physical main memory size on big SMP servers, not the limit of 64-bits worth of logical main memory).

While speed is important for real-time applications, so is reliability and availability, and that is why Kabira has added the HA Component to its middleware. This HA software is something that bolts on to the middleware, and applications do not have to be changed to be given the five nines (99.999%) availability that Kabira is promising with its HA add-on. However, Sutton said that Kabira made a lot of changes to the runtime environment to optimize it for fault tolerance, and therefore customers should recompile their code to get the best performance. The HA Component allows servers clustered using high-speed interconnect (such as InfiniBand) to shadow transactions across multiple nodes in active/active or active/passive mode; in the event that one node fails, the other one can finish processing the transactions, and the end users do not see any downtime. The software can also be extended using high-speed telecom links to offer disaster recovery to remote sites, which is something that telecom and financial services companies are often keen on since outages can cause them to lose customers and to be fined by governments. The software also has a place in the emerging RFID market, which requires real-time systems.

Sutton was a little cagey about what future platforms would be supported by Kabira's software beyond HP-UX and Solaris, but the two obvious choices are AIX and Linux. With Linux growing like crazy and big SMP boxes finally able to support the large memories that real-time applications require, Linux is probably what Kabira will chase first. (Sutton would not confirm the company's exact plans.) IBM's AIX Unix variant is also a logical choice, given the increasing popularity of its Power-based Unix platforms. Both end in X, which was Sutton's joke. My guess is Kabira comes to Linux first (since the company's press release says that Linux support is under development), and then goes to AIX if enough customers demand it.

The total high availability market (including servers, middleware, and other components) represented about $7.8 billion in sales last year, according to research by IDC. About $4.7 billion of that market was for clusters of Linux, Windows, and Unix servers that were clustered for failover, while the remainder was for HP NonStop, IBM TPF mainframes, and similar fault-tolerant servers from Stratus Technologies, NEC and others. With 64-bit support, big SMP servers available at reasonable prices (compared to a few years ago), and the ability to run on Unix and Linux, Kabira is poised to be considered as a viable alternative to the Web application server stack that most companies are trying to use to make real-time applications.

It also occurs to me that with a little tweaking, the Kabira software could be equipped with Apache and PHP and make one wickedly fast Web site. However, with Kabira software's costing $100,000 per processor, and with a starter kit and services costing $250,000 per processor, it may only be economically viable for big real-time applications until Kabira decides to make it up in volume and drop its prices.