Terracotta, a provider of Java application management tools, announced it is shipping a clustered enterprise edition of its Quartz job scheduler, as part of its Terracotta 3.2 platform release. The latest release of Quartz, called Quartz EX, is an enterprise edition of Quartz, an open source Java job scheduler acquired by Terracotta in November.
With this release, Quartz supports the new Terracotta Job Store, which provides a way for IT departments to schedule jobs across multiple groups of servers. For Quartz users who are currently clustering using a relational database as the central job store, the Terracotta Job Store provides an way to implement high availability, added performance, and scale-out, without the cost or administrative overhead of the relational database, the vendor says.
The Quartz integration is available via the same simple mechanism used by Terracotta Ehcache. Switching from un-clustered Quartz to clustered Quartz requires basic configuration changes that direct Quartz to use a running instance of the Terracotta Server Array to provide clustering.
"Quartz fits in as the automation engine," Jeff Hartley, vice president, marketing and products of Terracotta, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It can be embedded within enterprise applications or ran as a standalone process. In either case, it will execute defined tasks relating to the application or system maintenance upon their defined schedules. Using the Terracotta clustering approach will yield higher performance, better scalability and lower cost than using a database to store the job scheduling data.
Hartley adds that the Quartz solution offers capabilities in the emerging private cloud space. "We see more customers deploying to private clouds, and the prime motivation for involving Terracotta is to ensure that the data layer in clouds can scale to meet the demands of an elastic compute layer," he says. "Put simply, as organizations trial cloud deployments, they tend to see that databases become a bottle neck to scalability. This issue will come to a head here in 2010."
Hartley adds that "Quartz is currently utilized in a large number of mainframe installations, and has been in various such environments since 2001, when it began to be used on AS/400 systems. As teams migrate from mainframes to clouds, they will be able to keep their Quartz configuration virtually intact."
For more information, visit the Terracotta Quartz site.