I also wanted to bring one clarification on our solution. Our compute appliances deliver both CPU and memory capacity as a ‘Network accessed service’. In many ways we are the ‘power station’ for the grid. Any Java-based application hosted on a conventional server can access this capacity transparently over the network.

It’s also interesting to note that we work closely with the vendors you identify as ‘network accessed memory’ (such as Terracotta). As a matter of fact we just announced a strategic alliance with one of these vendors two weeks ago. You can look at Azul as the provider of raw CPU and memory capacity, while these software vendors provide the data management layer that leverages this capacity to provide a full ‘data grid solution’(data scalability across multiple nodes, data access, resiliency, HA, replication).

I have to say I was quite impressed with the Terracotta demo. I didn’t know data could be persisted. But again the aim here was not to write a comprehensive description of that solution but rather to introduce the different solutions for NAM, with special focus on Terracotta which is seen as a leader on the market.

Thanks again for your comments they are fully appropriate, dont worry about hijacking the article.

The Terracotta server itself can be clustered, which today can be configured as an active passive system. In the event of a failure of the active server the cluster will automatically switch over to the passive server with no loss of data or functionality.

In addition to this configuration, Terracotta supports persisting all data to disk which provides even more ability to intentionally or unintentionally terminate any process or all processes in the system with no loss of data.

Hope that helps – we can always move the discussion somewhere else or forums – I don’t want to hijack your article entirely

For NAP the actual concept has been “created” by Azul System for their system doing an analogy with NAS. So I guess that for the time being they’re the only one for sure the first ones.

For NAS/SAN there are quite a few solutions around I am not an expert on the field.

For the NAM field I guess Terracotta have probably one of the most mature solution on the market. GigaSpace also offers a solution but our consultant was not as enthusiast as he is for Terracotta. We actually had a demo with the Terracotta product : 2 instances of a Java Gui running in 2 different JVMs : a draw on one GUI would appear instantly on the other one. VERY impressive.

As far as this solution is concerned and to answer Taylor (thanks for your comment Taylor) maybe I should have said that the consulmtant reported us that the main limitation was this 2 minutes start-up time. I didn’t try myself.

By the way Taylor, if you have this NAM solution on one server taking care of instances of distributed objects, dont you identify this as a SPOF ?

Anyways, I’ve printed out, read and underlined all 4 articles of Cecil on high availability architectures: a really good job at making complex technology accesible to all!

Please feel free to email me for more details – I would like to know how you came to this conclusion.

Full disclosure – I work for Terracotta.

How would one go about implementing technology-solutions? Would you suggest going for an integrated solution of hardware + software, or buy them separately and build software on top?