Oracle has announced that the latest release of its distributed in-memory data grid product, Oracle Coherence 3.7, is now available. The new release simplifies the configuration and management of large scale deployments and offers customers more storage capabilities and dynamic load balancing of client connections.
In total, the 3.7 release includes almost 500 improvements over the 3.6 release which came out last July, Cameron Purdy, vice president of development, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The headline enhancement in this particular release is called Elastic Data, which enables the ability to scale up capacity that complements the scale out capacity that Coherence has always had, he adds. The new Elastic Data feature introduces technology that enables organizations to leverage both memory and disk-based devices for data grid storage, allowing near memory speed access to data, regardless of storage medium, and greater flexibility in capacity and resource planning.
Customers that demand extremely high data capacity combined with low-latency data access requirements, such as financial services firms and online retailers, can use Elastic Data to seamlessly manage data across memory and disk-based devices. Additional benefits of Elastic Data can include both the potential for significantly increased capacity, as well as smaller or more-easily managed deployments.
Oracle Coherence 3.7 also adds dynamic load balancing and automatic proxy discovery for Coherence*Extend clients, such as application servers or desktop applications accessing the Oracle Coherence data grid, allowing customers to more intelligently distribute and manage client connections, while also simplifying the configuration of large-scale environments.
Through integration with F5 BIG-IP Load Traffic Manager (LTM) and SSL Acceleration technologies, Oracle Coherence 3.7 allows users to leverage components of their existing infrastructure to secure, optimize and load balance application traffic generated from Coherence*Extend clients across any number of servers in a cluster and to hardware-accelerate the related CPU-intensive SSL encryption.
The new Coherence release introduces native integration with Oracle GlassFish Server via the Coherence*Web SPI for GlassFish, providing "no code change" installation and configuration of Coherence*Web, making it significantly easier for Oracle GlassFish Server users to scale their applications. Coherence 3.7 is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and is tightly integrated with the other products in Oracle's middleware stack, and is also part of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
In addition, Oracle recently announced that OpenLink, a global provider of cross-asset trading, risk management and related portfolio management software solutions for the commodity, energy and financial services market segments, had built an advanced grid-based energy trading platform using Coherence. OpenLink's Active Data Services (ADS) uses Oracle Coherence for a compute grid-based architecture that calculates and maintains risk, credit and physical position data throughout the trading day and can support millions of rows of real-time data. OpenLink's customers include Shell, Vattenfall, BP, E.ON, JPMC, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Merrill Lynch.