AEROSPACE

Combined With the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, GigaSpaces Provides Scalable, High-Performance Platform for Company's Online Booking System: GigaSpaces Technologies today announced that Miwok Airways is the latest customer to use GigaSpaces' cloud application server to run its real-time pricing engine and reservation system on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Combined with Amazon EC2, GigaSpaces' platform allows Miwok to easily scale on-demand and handle the complex transactional and data-intensive booking process, while only paying for servers and software when they are actually used. Miwok Airways, a Burlingame, CA-based start-up, provides on-demand private air travel at economy class prices. Passengers are able to set their own flight schedules, and prices are based on criteria such as the number of passengers and distance between airports. To reduce costs, passengers can coordinate joint flights with others using online social networking tools such as Facebook. Targeted at business travelers, flights on Cirrus propeller planes will be offered at more than 36 airstrips on the West Coast starting in the Fall of 2008. With constant fare changes based on passengers, route and time of day, Miwok has a data-intensive booking system that requires extremely high-scalability. The Company can take full advantage of Amazon EC2's cost-effective hardware offering by building the system on the GigaSpaces Extreme Application Platform (XAP). With GigaSpaces, Miwok's system can scale to meet spikes in demand, and shrink again when the extra servers are no longer necessary. GigaSpaces XAP also addresses Miwok's need for a completely fault-tolerant system and rapid response times. "Cloud computing is an extremely appealing proposition to a business with such dynamic needs as ours," said Veit Irtenkauf, Miwok Airways' Senior Vice President, Products. "But implementing a complex system such as ours on Amazon EC2 is not trivial. We need a system that can deal with a massive amount of transactional data on a daily basis and required a solution that could easily scale and work well with Amazon EC2. GigaSpaces was the only application server on the market we could find that met these needs." "Miwok has such a unique business model, and we are excited to add them to our customer roster," said Geva Perry, General Manager of Cloud Computing at GigaSpaces. "Miwok's on-demand flight system requires the on-demand scalability of GigaSpaces XAP -- the two really go hand-in-hand. Our ability to meet the needs of innovative companies such as Miwok shows that scaling complex data-intensive transactional applications on the cloud is no longer a problem. We look forward to helping Miwok keep its online booking system running smoothly, enabling them to provide high-quality service to their customers." GigaSpaces XAP is a next-generation application server built for today's most demanding enterprise and web applications. Unlike traditional application servers, GigaSpaces XAP enables predictable application scalability on-demand. XAP allows businesses and developers to predictably scale systems under any peak demand, guarantee performance under any data processing load, and seamlessly leverage the economies-of-scale offered by virtual computing environments such as clouds and grids. GigaSpaces has integrated its EC2 solution with a number of products to make deploying and managing applications on the Amazon cloud simple and quick. The Company recently announced a joint solution with RightScale's automated cloud computing management platform as well as a joint solution with the Elastic Server On-Demand from CohesiveFT, enabling cloud portability. Additionally, GigaSpaces provides support for the recently announced Sun OpenSolaris platform on Amazon EC2 as well as Amazon's FireFox plug-in, ElasticFox. GigaSpaces released the initial version of its Amazon EC2 offering in November 2007. More information is available at its Web site.