In-Memory Data Grids and Cloud Computing
January 23, 2014
Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: William Bain.
The use of in-memory data grids (IMDGs) for scaling application performance has rapidly increased in recent years as firms have seen their application workloads explode. This trend runs across nearly every vertical market, touching online applications for financial services, ecommerce, travel, manufacturing, social media, mobile, and more. At the same time, many firms are also looking to leverage the use of cloud computing to meet the challenge of ever increasing workloads. One of the fundamental promises of the cloud is elastic, transparent, on-demand scalability — a key capability that has become practical with the use of in-memory data grid technology. As such IMDGs are becoming a vital factor in the cloud, just as they have been for on-premise applications.
What makes IMDGs such a good fit with cloud computing? The promise of the cloud is a reduction in total cost of ownership. Part of that reduction comes from the ability to quickly provision and use new server capacity (without having to own the hardware). The essential synergy between IMDGs and the cloud derives from their common elasticity. IMDGs can scale out their memory-based storage and performance linearly as servers are added to the grid, and they can gracefully scale back when fewer servers are needed. IMDGs take full advantage of the cloud’s ability to easily spin-up or remove servers…
IMDGs enable cloud-hosted applications to be quickly and easily deployed on an elastic pool of cloud servers to deliver scalable performance, maintaining fast data access even as workloads increase. This is an ideal solution for fast-growing companies and for applications whose workloads create widely varying demands (like online flowers for Mother’s Day, concert tickets, etc.). These companies no longer need to create space, power, and cooling for new hardware to meet these fluctuating workloads. Instead, with a few button clicks, they can start up an IMDG-enabled cloud architecture, which transparently meets their performance demands at a cost is solely based on usage…
Read more from the source @ http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/2933766