There are not too many vendors that offer a really fast solution when it comes to working with super fast distributed cahing. As a consultant working on financial trading applications I always keep an eye on such tools.

At JavaOne I had a chance to meet with Cameron Purdy, from Tangosol. I was really impressed by their approach to improving the speed and reliability of in-memory data. They drastically minimize the number of time the data has to be access to guarantee availability of the same piece of data in all nodes of the cluster/data grid. Cameron explained me some technical details of how they move the processing closer to the data: you may either use a traditional approach when your application gets/puts the data from/to distributed cache, or instead of moving data over the wire, you can send the application itself to the data node.

Their Coherence product definitely worth considering if speed and high availability are the main requirements of your application.

I picked up their brochure…If I could give them one advice, it would be “Re-write your brochure “. It contains a set of standard promises to improve everything, but I’d make it more technical. Not everyone has a chance to meet with them in person to realize that their product may actually deliver the promise. Tangosol need more technical publications about thier products like this one.

Now they are partners with DataSynapse, a well known company in the data grid computing space. This partnership may bring a very fast and potent solution to the world of distributing computing.

P.S. After this blog was published, Cameron sent me the link to technical publications about their product.