Terracotta, a provider of Java infrastructure software, announced the availability of Ehcache 2.1, an upgrade to its distributed caching solution. New features include expanded support for IBM WebSphere, intended to help WebSphere users can take advantage of all the features of Ehcache.
"With Ehcache 2.1 we now offer WebSphere users a non-disruptive option to get an order of magnitude improvement in performance over the database and the ability to scale their applications to hundreds of application server instances," Amit Pandey, CEO of Terracotta, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "With Ehcache 2.1 WebSphere customers using Hibernate or Ehcache can get immediate tenfold performance and scalability gains with just two lines of configuration change."
Terracotta acquired Ehcache, which is designed to address caching requirements to help scale applications, in August 2009. In the last 10 months, Terracotta released four upgrades to Ehcache. In that same period, 50,000 users have moved to the latest version of Ehcache. Ehcache and Hibernate users find that the combined value of established open source technology and simple configuration changes enables them to scale their applications to hundreds of nodes. It represents an alternative to distributed caching technologies on the market such as Oracle Coherence, the vendor says.
Additional new capabilities in Ehcache 2.1 include a new plug-in enterprise monitor that provides real-time visibility into key performance metrics for the cache, enabling developers to optimize the performance of their applications. In addition, Terracotta Web Sessions, a fully coherent, highly available and durable web session clustering solution, is now available for IBM WebSphere, adding to its support for WebLogic, Tomcat, JBoss and Jetty. "Customers have already been using WebSphere with Ehcache," says Pandey. "What is new is the ability to switch to a fully coherent distributed cache under Ehcache that allows unlimited highly performant scale-out for both Hibernate and Ehcache-based apps. Also new is the ability for WebSphere customers to cache web sessions data using Terracotta. This solution is superior in performance, availability and scalability to the alternatives of using the database to store session state or using WebSphere native session clustering."
Other new features include configurable service-level agreement (SLA) parameters to ensure high performance and five-nines availability for mission critical applications. When typical operational problems occur, including disk failures, code deadlocks, network and database slowdowns and outages, Ehcache ensures that the application can respond to meet predetermined and stringent SLAs. Java Transaction API (JTA) support has also been improved; delivering enhanced transactional support for Hibernate.
Ehcache 2.1 is available for download here.