Terracotta Simplifies Shared Java Memory

The company today is announcing updates to three offerings that are all intended to make Terracotta technology more accessible. The Terracotta server offloads memory-intensive processing of Java applications from the underlying database, making it easier to scale these applications.

But adoption of the technology has been slow due to the fact that most developers are unfamiliar with how to invoke it, said Jeff Hartley, Terracotta vice president of marketing and products. To solve this problem, Terracotta recently acquired distributed caching software called Ehcache and job scheduling software called Quartz. The basic idea is to make Terracotta’s approach to shared Java memory a function that can be seamlessly invoked using Ehcache and Quartz, which are more familiar to most Java developers, said Hartley.

As databases continue to strain under the growing wait of applications, distributed approaches to cache memory have gained in usage. But as cloud computing models continue to evolve, Hartley notes that the data layer of enterprise computing is not keeping pace with the compute layer in its ability to scale.

As a result, Hartley argues customers will increasingly need to look for solutions that seamlessly augment the performance of their database applications. The only way to accomplish that, says Hartley, is to either invest in expensive clusters or databases, or adopt technology such as the Terracotta software that costs substantially less to deploy and manage.