Thomas Kas Thomas

Terracotta offers bolt-on distributed caching

8-Oct-2009

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Web Content and Experience Management

Caching is one of those infrastructural concerns that isn't terribly sexy (unless you're a true IT geek) but is nevertheless key to making a WCM system perform well. It's a notoriously tricky thing to set up, especially in n-tier systems with complex scale-out requirements.

But this week, distributed caching may have gotten a bit easier. San Francisco-based Terracotta, Inc. has announced a distributed caching framework that marries Terracotta's Network Attached Memory system with Ehcache (a popular Java-based general-purpose caching framework).

Terracotta (in case you're not familiar with it) is a system for clustering the Java Virtual Machine transparently across multiple machines in such a way that native Java apps essentially don't know they've been clustered. Terracotta for Ehcache makes Ehcache a distributed cache, shielding apps from issues involving cache locality.

The Terracotta folks claim that with their system it's possible to see a 30 to 90% database load reduction and up to a ten-fold increase in Ehcache application performance in clustered systems. At the same time, you can add extra app servers any time you need to, to increase system capacity, and Terracotta will transparently take care of data-syncing so that there are no single points of failure. 

The product comes in three supported enterprise versions priced at $5,000 to $8,000 per cluster node. Greg Luck, lead developer of Ehcache, has joined Terracotta and will continue to lead Ehcache R&D.

In a cloud-crazed IT environment, Terracotta for Ehcache may prove disruptive for Oracle's Coherence product (introduced in 2007 in the wake of Oracle's acquisition of Tangosol) and IBM's ObjectGrid. (It's probably also tough competition for distributed-cache vendor GemStone.) Terracotta hasn't exactly commoditized the space, but with Ehcache remaining open-source, it changes the nature of the game for purveyors of closed-source cacheware, much as Apache Lucene and Solr are changing the game for search players like Endeca and Autonomy.

This kind of development also has potentially interesting implications for the ever-growing number of Java-based web CMS and Portal players who are trying to enterprise-harden their heretofore not-easily-scalable systems. Mastering the arcane art of caching and clustering is key to achieving the scalability and high-availability characteristics that enterprise customers demand, and not all smaller CMS vendors have been able to meet this challenge gracefully. That may change with the advent of  "bolt-on" clustering and caching, which is essentially what Terracotta is offering.

It will be interesting to see what develops. We'll keep you advised.

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