Welcome to another "First Look" podcast. I'm your host, ebizQ's Project Manager, Gian Trotta. Joining us today is Billy Newport, IBM's senior technical staff member, chief architect for WebSphere XD ObjectGrid. He's going to discuss the implementation challenges and application benefits of data grid architecture. Welcome, Billy, and thanks for joining us.

Billy Newport: Thanks a lot, it's great to be here.

Gian Trotta: Billy, what exactly is a data grid and what advantage can it confer on an Enterprise?

BN: Conventional applications have been built in kind of multiple tiers, where you have a data tier and an application tier. And those kinds of architectures have served us well over the years. But recently, in some kinds of environments with the kind of work loads, the way they have been increasing -- those application architectures have kind of been showing their age. We're now seeing kind of a transition to data grid-type architectures where instead of pulling the application data from the data base, what we're seeing a trend through now is integrating the application with the data, so that the data is co-resident with the application. And then we scale out the application and grid technology.

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