Red Hat and In-Memory Data Grids – Increasing adoption in the enterprise

I'm happy to share that Red Hat was named a leader for our in-memory data grid (IMDG) technology by Forrester Research. The ranking follows recognition of Red Hat JBoss Data Grid, our open source IMDG product, as a finalist in the Database Trends and Applications magazine Readers' Choice awards.

We believe that we're delivering award-worthy capabilities to customers, and this recognition is both inspiring and validating, but it's also exciting to see this interest in IMDGs from the media and analyst communities. The time has come for IMDGs to move toward more mainstream adoption as pressures from big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the “3 Vs” (volume, velocity, and variety) demand greater performance and scalability than what enterprise IT has historically been able to provide. As the cost of memory continues to fall, I think we'll see more and more IMDG technologies deployed in the enterprise as a way to help alleviate the demands on data and data sources.

The authors of the Q3 2015 Forrester Wave™: In-Memory Data Grids describe one of the challenges associated with these demands, stating “Customers won't wait. They want apps to be instantly responsive. They also want apps that serve them well with increasing functionality. These requirements are polar opposites that often result in Sophie's Choice compromises,” which they define as an impossibly difficult choice in a no-win situation.

Delivering outstanding customer experiences in highly competitive markets can be dependent on the quality and performance of customer facing applications. Today, we believe that IMDGs help enterprises avoid the types of compromises described by Forrester.

IMDGs use chip-based random access memory (RAM) to store data, rather than solid-state drives (SSDs), spinning discs, or tape drives. This, combined with their distributed nature, allows greater scalability and faster access and compute capabilities. Whereas applications were once limited by the speed of the slowest data source, overall system performance can now be improved by storing the most frequently accessed information in memory. Data can be managed in multi-node clusters to provide high availability, and can also be replicated across data centers for disaster recovery.

Customer-facing websites and applications handle a sizable portion of the world’s business via self-service web applications, websites, e-commerce engines, mobile applications, and a variety of information services. Many organizations create innovative and engaging applications only to find that customers are abandoning them because of slow performance. Even a few seconds delay can mean the difference between success and failure for a new business initiative. This can be true of non-customer facing use cases as well, such as fraud detection in the financial services industry. One of the factors contributing to poor application performance is the inability to access, process, analyze, and integrate data fast enough. These data bottlenecks are becoming more common as organizations need to process larger volumes and greater varieties of data to meet customer expectations.

We're proud to say that organizations around the world can—and have—taken advantage of JBoss Data Grid to improve application scalability and performance. AAA North America, a non-profit federation of several dozen independently operated motor clubs throughout North America, and Scholastic, a book publishing company, both used JBoss Data Grid to help transform their customer experience and support stringent business requirements. An analyst whitepaper detailing each of these deployments is available if you'd like to learn more.

Leaders in the Q3 2015 Forrester Wave: In-Memory Data Grid report are cited as having breadth and depth, and are said to “offer the most comprehensive set of features to accommodate the broadest use cases and have good to excellent strategies.” The authors go on to discuss JBoss Data Grid, stating, “Red Hat provides the purest of the open source solutions. Red Hat fine-tuned JBoss Data Grid to work seamlessly with the Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio. It is also a very capable IMDG for a wide range of applications that require acceleration.”

Download a complimentary copy of the report from Red Hat, or visit our website to learn more about JBoss Data Grid.