Since the 2011 introduction of the Red Hat JBoss Data Grid Early Adopter Program, developers have been receiving updates on our upcoming cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed key-value store. Today, we're proud to unveil the next step in Red Hat's efforts to provide a high-scale application caching and NoSQL offering with the introduction of the downloadable public beta of Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 – Red Hat's first major data grid product.

The challenges enterprises are facing in regards to managing data are mounting. As large-scale organizations attempt to manage growing data volume, they're finding that not only is the volume, type and velocity increasing so are the opportunities to put that data to use. Given these two critical IT issues, relational databases are not a one-size-fits-all solution. This is the crux of the big data and NoSQL movements.

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 is an in-memory database that provides an elastic data store that can optionally write to disk and be used with transactional applications. This provides a highly performant, flexible data solution for a wide range of use cases and style of applications, reducing the need for costly relational databases.

Based on the JBoss Community project Infinispan, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 helps enterprises "ease into the cloud." In fact, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 is specifically built for the cloud, developed from the ground up to be highly available, elastic and scalable. The solution can be easily deployed on premise, in a cloud or as a hybrid data tier, and can be used with any number of technologies including Java, .NET, Python and many others. The end result is that applications can more easily meet demand as it's needed versus scaling up in advance of demand.

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6.0 beta helps enterprises:

• Integrate NoSQL more easily. Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 offers a fast, intuitive key-value store with in-memory speeds, making it easier for organizations to add NoSQL to their development toolboxes.

• Better manage big data. Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 supports high-volume workloads with low-latency and optional transaction support.

• Scale application development. The costs and complexity of scaling a relational data tier can be extremely high. Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6's cloud-centric architecture serves as a streamlined cache between application and data tier and allows organizations to spin nodes up and down along with their cloud applications.

Key features of Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 beta include:

• Schema-less key-value store

• Distributed and replicated storage

• High availability, with the option to write to disk

• Embeddable in-memory or as client-server

• Multiple access protocols, including memcached, REST, HotRod, and JSR-107

• Elastic scaling

• Production-ready monitoring and administrative tools

• Data replication and auto-failover

We encourage customers, developers and partners to download the Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 beta today, and look forward to your feedback.