The evolution of cloud technologies has transformed how developers create and deploy online applications. As organisations shift from traditional data management approaches to cloud-based solutions, developers face increasing demands for real-time data access, high availability, and scalability. Data management requirements have driven the need for advanced in-memory caching tools like ScaleOut StateServer®.
ScaleOut StateServer is a scalable, in-memory distributed cache designed to store rapidly changing data for fast access. Traditional databases add latency in accessing data and can become bottlenecks to scaling. In contrast, ScaleOut StateServer hosts data in memory and combines multiple servers to simultaneously handle requests, making it an essential tool for applications that require quick access to data. Its robust, battle-tested, in-memory data grid technology has evolved over two decades, providing developers and operations teams with tools that deliver high-speed data access and coherent data storage across large-scale environments.
The Need for Scalable Processing
As online applications grow to handle large workloads, the demand for faster, more scalable data access becomes more urgent. In industries like finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce, consistent fast data access is particularly important. By distributing data across a cluster of servers, ScaleOut StateServer can ensure that applications respond quickly, even during high traffic times or server failures. This approach boosts performance and improves reliability by keeping the system running smoothly even if one or more servers go down.
A key feature of ScaleOut StateServer is its ability to dynamically rebalance data as servers are added or removed to handle workload changes. This means that as the demand fluctuates, ScaleOut StateServer automatically adjusts how the data is stored and accessed to keep applications running fast while minimising server costs. For example, a growing e-commerce platform can use these capabilities to handle traffic spikes, ensuring important operations like transactions stay fast while minimising resource consumption during periods of low activity. ScaleOut’s scaling lets developers focus on building features instead of managing performance.
Fast, Reliable Data Storage
Traditional caching solutions, which rely on a single server, often fall short when managing the growing volume of data and traffic in online applications. This is where ScaleOut StateServer’s patented cache distribution features become important. Cache distribution allows data storage, processing, and retrieval to be spread across multiple servers simultaneously. It ensures faster access, greater reliability, and scaling as applications grow.
Cache distribution is also essential for high availability – a necessary part of any mission-important data strategy, especially as most online applications depend on uninterrupted operations. A single system outage can lead to massive financial losses, reputational damage, and a loss of customer trust. For developers, the goal is to avoid downtime, and ensure that applications can recover quickly and avoid data loss or corruption. ScaleOut’s patented algorithms ensure data consistency after server failures and avoid problems inherent in the ‘eventual consistency’ approach taken by some distributed caches.
For example, consider a financial trading platform serving thousands of global traders who require real-time access to market data, transaction histories, and price updates. During periods of high volatility, a surge in requests can overwhelm a single cache server, causing delays and potential trading losses. By using ScaleOut StateServer’s distributed cache, the platform can spread its data across multiple servers, ensuring low-latency access, high performance, reliable storage, and high availability. The result is a more responsive, scalable, and resilient trading platform.
Global Data Distribution
As more organisations adopt cloud computing, developers increasingly move away from on-premises data centres. Breaking out of the data centre involves transitioning from physical infrastructure to cloud-based solutions that provide on-demand resources and services. The use of multiple cloud data centres also provides disaster recovery in case of data centre outages.
ScaleOut StateServer is uniquely positioned to support this transition. Its distributed caching software can span multiple data centres in different geographic regions, providing low-latency access with full data consistency, no matter where users are located. Applications can take advantage of global load balancers to distribute their workloads across multiple data centres while maintaining a single view of cached data. Whether an application is running in a traditional data centre, a hybrid environment, or fully in the cloud, ScaleOut StateServer can scale with any infrastructure.
Fast Query and Analytics
Built using technology created for supercomputers, ScaleOut StateServer helps developers avoid performance bottlenecks by migrating functionality to the distributed cache. Instead of burdening the network and client systems, applications can query or analyse large volumes of stored data easily, combine the results in the cache, and deliver them to client systems. For example, an e-commerce site can examine the shopping carts for thousands of shoppers with one API call and immediately discover real-time shopping trends. ScaleOut uses the power of parallel computing to accelerate these tasks and boost application performance.
Final Thoughts
With its high performance, built-in high availability, and industry-leading ease of use, ScaleOut StateServer ensures that data is always quickly accessible and highly available. With over two decades of development, this powerful, proven in-memory data grid and distributed cache has become an important resource for developers building applications. For companies looking to optimise performance, reduce downtime, and make their applications cloud-ready, ScaleOut StateServer is a proven and dependable solution that demonstrates the full potential of distributed caching in maximising application performance.
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