Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6.1 Brings High Performance, Availability, Reliability & Elastic Scale to Modern Applications

In-memory data grid technologies have received quite a bit of attention over the past year. Data grids are an attractive technology for modernizing and maximizing data and cloud investments because they boost application performance, provide greater deployment flexibility and minimize the overhead of standing up new applications. We’ve been a part of this rising tide since unveiling Red Hat JBoss Data Grid last year. Today we’d like to introduce the latest version of our intelligent distributed caching solution, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6.1, and share some of the new features we’ve added.

We like to think of Red Hat JBoss Data Grid as a supercharger for enterprise applications. In essence, it takes traditional approaches to application data and turns them on on their heads by boosting the speed and reach of data access for applications throughout the enterprise on an as-needed basis – attributes that are becoming increasingly important for organizations that rely on structured or unstructured data for operational and competitive advantages.

For example, a stock market can enhance its daily transaction volumes by using Red Hat’s data grid technology as a replicated cache to hold a discreet, temporal set of data to provide extremely fast read access by multiple applications. Similarly, a retailer or bank can support international expansion by using Red Hat JBoss Data Grid to manage and process data across multiple data centers in a geographically efficient manner, as well as for cross-data center replication to scale up operations in new geographical regions. Achieving the same level of performance and scalability may be prohibitively expensive and technologically complex with traditional databases and caching technologies.

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid provides what traditional caching and databases typically do not, including distribution, elastic scale, processing alongside data, cross-data center replication, and the ability to manage the data grid independently from the application it serves. These capabilities are strengthened by a bevy of new features:

• Cross-data center replication allows for replication across clusters and locations, resulting in better performance for remote users and applications, improved SLAs, and increased uptime.
• Non-blocking state transfer (NBST) improves elasticity via a new pause-less join-and-leave protocol for when a state transfer is in progress, as well as improves availability during transfer.
• Improved map/reduce provides increased support for long-running compute applications, improved ease-of-use, and it allows use of a compute grid with a de facto standard programming API.
• Rolling upgrades for Hot Rod caches offer lower downtime when migrating from one version of Red Hat JBoss Data Grid to the next, better service to users, simpler operations, and reduced cost of management.
• Context Dependency Injection (CDI) support boosts developer productivity, allowing them to bind the life cycle and interaction of shared components to well-defined contexts, and then inject those components at deployment time into a known interface.

Red Hat offers its customers a unique value proposition: enterprise capabilities in an open source offering. Products in our middleware portfolio, like the data grid, are adept at helping organizations create and integrate modern applications for modern infrastructures. Unlike proprietary, closed stacks, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid is an open solution compatible with other applications, platforms or databases and offers the flexibility to work with technologies in any environment, whether cloud, on premise or hybrid. The benefit of being able to leverage existing investments in database technology means that Red Hat JBoss Data Grid users are able to scale up their applications without adding additional relational database licenses and costs.

This flexibility and openness are key factors in Red Hat’s vision for enabling open hybrid clouds. Many businesses today have infrastructure residing both on premise and in the cloud, presenting deployment and integration challenges for proprietary, closed-source solutions, which can tend to be too rigid and cost-prohibitive to be effective in these environments. Alternatively, open source data grids are designed to work with technologies in cloud, on-premise or hybrid cloud scenarios and give applications a layer of data abstraction from the persistent store, regardless of where it is located.

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid is based on the popular Infinispan project and works with a number of applications, languages and frameworks, including Java, Spring, .NET and C#. Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6.1 is available via subscription globally. For additional information, please visit http://www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/data-grid.