Coherence- The next big thing for the cloud!!
With RAM memory cost decreasing drastically, a new kind of computing paradigm is in the offing. Server Systems without Hard-disks may not be far-off.
Disk-based computing is fraught with performance and management issues and doing away with Disks though not practical now, maybe true in the future. This also calls for a re-think of our current application architecture which is so focussed on disk-based persistence.
Coherence the In-memory data grid from Oracle is one of the futuristic solutions that seems to ideally fit this gap. Coherence provides an in-memory data caching service which can also be clustered across several servers. In effect, Coherence provides a capability to store application data in Memory (RAM) clustered across different servers. It takes care of backing up the data across several nodes as well as a robust indexing mechanism to quickly access the data. It also supports massive parallel computing capabilities allowing application logic to execute on the data in the data-grid in parallel.
As cloud-computing taking root, it becomes imperative for getting the maximum performance from the cloud-hosted application with the minimum investment in infrastructure. Coherence will allow the cloud application to access data quickly from the RAM instead of going to the Disk, thereby improving performance by several orders of magnitude. The coherence solution is resilient to data loss as it maintains a backup of the data on other nodes in the cluster.
Theoretically, the entire cloud application can be built using Coherence as the data persistence layer. In practice, the disk storage will still be required from a reporting and enterprise data storage persective. But the moot point is that the role of disk storage as it is used today is set to reduce drastically.
More and more transaction oriented processing will happen on the coherence grid with write-back setup to store data offline to disk storage.
Thus Coherence is set to become one of the most important technologies for building the next generation Cloud Application.
Comments
Nice briefing on this product , thanks ....With Coherence enterprise scalability is also improves a lot .
Posted by: Rupesh Somani | March 7, 2011 8:39 AM
Hi Rupesh,
Thanks for your comments.
The aim of this post was to bring out a paradigm shift in application architecture which may be coming in the near future, especially in the context of cloud computing.
Coherence is definitely one of the best ways to improve scalability of Enterprise J2EE applications. There are multiple ways to use Coherence to improve scalability in the Enterprise Context.
I will write more on this topic in the next few blogs.
regards,
Satyajith
Posted by: Satyajith Nair
|
March 8, 2011 6:08 AM