Red Hat, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced the launch of JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache, which can help ease the load on database servers, reduce response times in applications, and provide additional failure resilience. JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6 is based on the popular JBoss Community project, Infinispan, and will initially be available through an Early Access Program.
This offering is targeted at all levels of cloud implementations, Rich Sharples, director of product management for middleware at Red Hat, tells 5 Minute briefing. "JBoss Enterprise Data Grid's intended use is for on-premise deployments, private cloud - supported by Red Hat's CloudForms - and the public cloud, as part of OpenShift."
JBoss Enterprise Data Grid is designed from the core to support cloud-scale computing with concepts such as multi-tenancy, elasticity and distributed code execution. Enterprises will have the opportunity to harness those capabilities to deploy highly available, massively scalable and highly performant shared data grids to accelerate applications and curtail data-tier costs.
Data Grid overlaps offerings such as MapReduce in some areas, "but generally they attack different problems," Sharples says. "MapReduce is about breaking down computation over large data sets into smaller chunks and leveraging horizontal scaling to execute in parallel. It's a fairly specialized framework and is limited to a certain class of problem. It's also batch, process oriented - take large data set, break into chunks, compute chunks, recombine answers, deliver answers." JBoss Enterprise Data Grid enables data caching, which has more of a general purpose, he continues. "It can speed up and scale pretty much any existing application without a lot of architectural disruption but is also used to hold very large data sets in RAM so analysis and computation can be performed."
Scaling the data-tier has become a technical and economic challenge for organizations, with scaling up involving additional hardware and database software licenses, and scaling out involving complex data partitioning or clustering technologies. The flexibility and agility provided by data grids is a natural complement to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and contemporary shared-services architectures.
Red Hat also announced that it has opened registration to an early access program for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, which is planned to be released for general availability at the beginning of next year. The release of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 reflects the culmination of Red Hat's efforts to facilitate the adoption of Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 technologies, enable a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)-ready platform and help simplify the management of application servers regardless of where they are deployed.
As with previous versions, JBoss Platform 6 is open source,with a supported, commercial edition available as well. "The project - JBoss Application Server - is open source, and the commercial distribution - JBoss Enterprise Application Platform - is also open source, with the same code and same code repository," says Sharples.
As the runtime engine for Red Hat's PaaS offerings, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 is designed to be deployed within PaaS environments. With its new architecture, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 will make it easier than ever to tune and size the application server to fit the workload, whether in a physical, virtualized or cloud deployment.
Sharples observes that the JBoss Platform is at the foundation of many cloud private implementations. "Many of our more advanced customers, over the last couple of years have been moving to virtualized, dynamic, scalable infrastructure - essentially a private cloud. I think it's a natural move for the kind of customers who have moved to JBoss and Red Hat - they're looking for better value, more flexibility and agility."
More information is at the Red Hat website.