Tangosol, Inc., announced the release of Coherence 2.4, an update to the data clustering technology used to manage large J2EE applications. In an effort to document the benefits to using its clustering program, the company provided actual case studies of companies using Coherence. The studies quantifiably show the cost-saving benefits of Coherence.

This latest release adds IBM WebSphere to Coherence's already extensive list of supported platforms. Coherence*Web is a high performance sessions management tool that ships with Coherence 2.4. The inclusion of IBM WebSphere will add to the dynamic nature of Coherence*Web, which is scalable to hundreds of networks and servers.

What will be of interest to companies requiring real-time management of cached data, such as banks and financial institutions, is the new Write-Mostly caching model that Coherence 2.4 introduces.

With this new caching functionality, the problem of how to manage, in real-time, automatically expiring data is solved. Manipulating very large data streams had been difficult; the sheer volume of data that a processor had to deal with did not leave enough room for content management.

Cameron Purdy, CEO of Tangosol, elaborated, "Write-Mostly Caching solves the challenge of how to efficiently store the recent history of massive data feeds without any bottlenecks or single points of failure. These data feeds are often processed on a real-time basis, but the data rate for some of these feeds has just been way too high to allow the contents, which are electronic documents, to be stored for later reference. Coherence is already widely used for the real-time processing of large data feeds because it scales extremely well and eliminates single points of failure, and with the new Write-Mostly Caching capability, the documents coming through those feeds can be instantly accessible for a business day, an entire week, or even longer."

With Coherence, 24-hour access to data is available. This maximizes the resources used in supporting transient data. The system is apparently very easy to use, with minimal disruption of work- or system-flow. The testimonial of Better Petshop Project's John Mammen, one of Tangosol's case studies, illustrates this:

"This was my first experience with Coherence. My first impression of the product is very good. Coherence was extremely easy and straightforward to set up, and works exactly as advertised. I followed the directions and deployed my application. Within fifteen minutes Coherence was managing my clustered server environment. I have not had to make any adjustments since then."