10/29/2003

GemStone Systems announced general availability of the GemFire Suite, version 2.2, a high performance data services solution. GemStone describes GemFire as “a flexible, high performance, cross-platform and cost-effective solution for data distribution, caching and management across the enterprise in real-time. The 2.2 release adds significant new features that continue to increase efficiency and scalability of mission critical enterprise applications, as well as performance improvements. “

“The GemFire product is continually improved upon to address the needs of our customers”, said Raj Kulkarni, chief technology officer at GemStone. “The features that have been added to the GemFire Suite, version 2.2, provide increased scalability and performance results for financial services companies that utilize a virtualized data layer for quick decision making. The faster the data can be accessed and distributed, the faster decisions can be made, resulting in larger revenue margins for Wall Street firms.”

“The GemFire solution delivers high performance data distribution and data management benefits and reduces system costs, a top concern for chief architects,” GemStone points out. “GemFire’s pervasive interoperability improves the utilization of an enterprise's infrastructure, diminishes development time costs and makes many large technology investments, such as additional hardware, databases and storage, unnecessary.

“The GemFire Suite, Version 2.2, features new additions, including dynamic hierarchical caching and support for C/C++ as well as Java processes in the distributed cache. The hierarchical cache configuration directly supports a GemStone customer pilot architecture, in which this leading financial services company needed to distribute real time data that resides in database servers to a high volume of service machines, each servicing a large number of client machines. The overall impact of this architecture change will significantly cut down the traffic to the database servers and on the network, provide better performance consistently and increase database scalability.

“A new API has also been introduced providing native cache access to ‘C’ applications. This enhancement now allows ‘C’ applications to seamlessly share data at high speeds across processes and machine boundaries. GemFire 2.2 manages data in a format that allows for easy interoperability with Java. The use of Java for data services is extremely beneficial as enterprises may manage data via multiple channels, such as through Web services standards to access data as XML. The result for an enterprise is increased scalability as users are able to share data concurrently without over-extending the system.”

"There is an unprecedented focus on efficient data management in the securities industry right now, and strong demand for products that remove bottlenecks in data acquisition, management and delivery” said Dushyant Shahrawat, senior analyst at TowerGroup. “Financial firms are constantly evaluating ways to improve data management without considerable restructuring of their current IT environment. Products that can be easily implemented into an institution’s existing infrastructure, and quickly allow an organization to not only access data in the system but also distribute it across geographic boundaries in real-time, have a bright future.”