Kabira Transaction Software Obviates Need for Middleware, Databases

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Imagine, if you will, how simple the computing world might be if you had infinite, virtually free main memory. You wouldn't have to use disk arrays, which would mean you wouldn't need 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. This new kind of middleware is precisely what Kabira Technologies has spent seven years developing.

Memory is not infinite and it certainly is not free. But high-volume, real-time transaction processing environments such as stock brokerages, credit card processing facilities, online reservation systems, and other similar applications want and need a means to simplify their online environments--at least according to Paul Sutton, CEO at Kabira. In these environments, companies often require specialized operating systems, 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.

The Kabira technology is a multifunction middleware suite designed to live in memory--specifically, the giant shared memories of the biggest SMP servers. Sutton says that about 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. As more products move from post-paid batch operations (like credit card processing for the past several decades) to pre-paid, near-real-time processing (a debit card has to determine if you have money before it allows a transaction, for instance), using the current middleware stack is expensive and inefficient. "Any system that needs a customer name or a customer balance is moving toward a real-time system, whether they like it or not."

Kabira thinks it has a better answer to solving this problem. Kabira's software has two pieces. For a couple of years, Kabira has been selling a 32-bit product for Solaris and HP-UX called the Infrastructure System. This is the heart of the product, which 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. While it was very fast, Infrastructure System was only a 32-bit product, which meant that the 4 GB main memory limit on 32-bit systems only allowed it a few gigabytes of space to store customer files. By moving to 64-bits with the Infrastructure System 5.0 release, the potential capacity for main memory is virtually infinite, and can contain about 400 billion customer records of the type stored by financial institutions (provided you could wire all the chips together, which you can't). Practically speaking, the real limits to main memory are about 1 TB today, with 2 TB share memories on big SMP boxes being available next year when 2 Gigabit main memory DIMMs come down in price. Obviously, a lot more customer records can be stored inside the latest iteration of the Infrastructure System.

But the real benefit of the system is not storage, but speed. Sutton says that because transactions and applications are running in memory, the latencies between transactions can be reduced by a factor of 500 or more compared to the traditional database-middleware-transaction monitor stack used on OLTP environments.

On the front-end of the Infrastructure System is the second part of the Kabira environment, the Transaction Switch, which will be available in its 2.0 release in November as well. As the name suggests, this product was an integration product, speeding the flow of data through elements of transaction systems and linking into existing applications and middleware. Kabira knows customers will want to create new services in its environment, but they will also want to hook into legacy environments and boost as much of the transaction processing as possible with these, too.

The Kabira software is currently running on the Visa credit card processing network, and Kabira has 70 customers in financial services, telecommunications, and government facilities where real-time, high-speed transaction processing is vital, not just a dream. Sutton says the software is available for Solaris and HP-UX today, and there is an outside chance it will be ported to AIX. As Linux moves forward and matures, Kabira will be ready to move to that platform. Sutton says Kabira completed a port to Microsoft 's Windows environment, but because of operating system deficiencies, decided to not make it a product. In theory, Kabira can run in a POSIX-compliant environment. Applications can be written in C or C++, and the development tools Kabira provides adhere to the Object Management Group's Unified Modeling Language specification.

The Kabira transaction system may be able to replace big and expensive TPF systems (There are about 400 in the world, according to Sutton.), but Kabira, which has been backed with $30 million in venture capital, has set its sights on a broader market: the new real-time applications, such as those being created by wireless service providers every day, that will be written over the coming years and which do not need to run in environments like TPF. The Kabira software is not cheap at $100,000 per processor and $250,000 per processor including a starter kit and services, but considering the millions of dollars that it costs to create or extend real-time systems and to build n-tier systems in the first place, this pricing may not be prohibitively expensive.