Alternative to distributed caching

Question

Hi,

There is a technical requirement to scale a new system easily. This new system consists of three tiered applications (as a batch processors). Each tier will contains at least 2 servers with the same application resides on each server.

So, when one of the tier reaches peak performance, we could extend the scalability easily by adding a new server and the same application to off-load some of the processing loads.

The problem is that one or two of the three tiers require heavy caching (about 3 million records and increasing).

I'm thinking of using distributed caching system to overcome this problem but the new distributed caching system will means an additional point of failure as applications now need to interact with additional caching systems for processing.

I'm currently looking at ncache but just wondering if there is an alternatives to this problem? or is there any other comparable distributed caching system that maybe similar or better than ncache and provide enterprise supports too?

Thanks,

Chen

Answer 1

You can find in this IBM article the main actors in DCP (Distributed Caching Platforms) environment.

The alternative we are using (not free) is Gigaspace XAP.

Answer 2

Chen the data that you put in the cache usually has a persistent store e.g. database and you put it in cache for quick access therefore cache in that scenario does not become a point of failure.

Suppose you used cache as a persistent store for some temporary state, in that case your distributed cache can use replication to ensure availability even if one of the nodes goes down.

NCache does support replication with in a cluster as well as across the clusters (using bridges).

So as long as you have more than a single node in your cache cluster it won't become a single point of failure.