08/18/2003

Coherence 2.2, clustered JCache software for Enterprise Java and Grid Computing platforms, is now available from Tangosol. According to the company, "Coherence increases the scalable performance and reliability of enterprise applications deployed on J2EE platforms such as BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere by providing in-memory speed for sharing data among servers in an application server cluster, with transparent failover and no single points of failure.

Tangosol says Release 2.2 adds significant new features that continue to simplify the configuration and management of large-scale enterprise cache architectures, as well as improvements in scalable performance:

• Application caches can be completely configured using XML deployment descriptors, even for complex multi-tier cache infrastructures. Cache server processes are now supported out-of-the-box, allowing applications to select among in-process, out-of-process and near-cache models at deployment time.



• Applications can define custom cache-eviction policies, in addition to the built-in LRU, LFU and LLRFU (Logarithmic Least Recently/Frequently Used) algorithms. Caches can also be configured to automatically overflow to disk, to limit memory consumption for extremely large caches and to handle unpredictably large data requirements.



• Configurable thread pools are now provided to ensure the scalable performance of Coherence-based Grid Computing Architectures, Partitioned Caches, parallel-distributed cache queries and database-backed caches.



• Cache statistics, from evictions all the way down to the clustering and network layers, have been standardized and their coverage dramatically expanded.

"I'm very impressed with the new configuration features; they are very powerful, yet incredibly easy to use. We were able to painlessly upgrade our production applications to the 2.2 release, because Tangosol makes sure that their releases maintain backwards compatibility. We also witnessed an instant increase in performance of over 30% and a decrease in memory utilization of over 50% due to the object serialization optimizations and thread pooling features in this release," said Rick Gibbs, CTO of Dealer.com web systems.

"This is in a production application that had already benefited tremendously from the use of Coherence," he added. "For example, we reduced some two- and three-hour jobs down to about two minutes just by taking advantage of Coherence caching features."

"Our goal remains to provide the most reliable, most highly available, and easiest to implement clustered caching and grid computing product," added Cameron Purdy, president of Tangosol. "One look at the simplicity of our powerful new XML-based cache configuration, and it should be obvious that we continue to deliver on that vision. What isn't evident from the feature checklist is the amount of testing and the number of small refinements that help to ensure the real-world reliability of our software."

"We're very pleased with the performance and reliability of the current Coherence 2.1.1 release that we have deployed," said Marty Dow, Chief Architect for Internet Systems at GEICO, "and we're definitely looking forward to seeing some of the new 2.2 capabilities in action."