Terracotta, a provider of infrastructure software for enterprise Java scalability, on Tuesday announced the availability of Ehcache 2.1, an upgrade to its distributed caching solution. Since Terracotta acquired Ehcache in August, 2009, its adoption rate has accelerated, driven by the company's investment in research and development. As a result, a growing number of customers are using Ehcache for all their caching needs - scaling applications seamlessly from a single computer to large virtualized data center environments and private clouds. The importance of distributed caching is outlined in a report that ranks Terracotta as a leader: "The Forrester Wave: Elastic Caching Platforms, Q2 2010," Forrester Research, Inc., May, 2010.

In the last ten months, Terracotta has released four upgrades to Ehcache all in response to customer demands. In that same period, 50,000 users have moved to the latest version of Ehcache, and more than 100 organizations have upgraded to enterprise editions including Adobe, News Digital Media, a division of News Corporation, and Raytheon. Ehcache and Hibernate users find that the combined value of established open source technology and simple configuration changes enables them to scale their applications to hundreds of nodes. It represents a non-disruptive, easier to use and more broadly applicable alternative to proprietary distributed caching technologies such as Oracle Coherence.

New capabilities in Ehcache 2.1 include:

• New Plug-in Enterprise Monitor for Ehcache provides real-time visibility into key performance metrics for the cache, enabling developers to optimize the performance of their applications. The plug-in is backwards compatible with previous editions of Ehcache and requires no code changes.

• Expanded support for IBM WebSphere ensures that WebSphere users can take advantage of all the features of Ehcache. In addition, Terracotta Web Sessions, a fully coherent, highly available and durable Web session clustering solution, is now available for IBM WebSphere, adding to its support for WebLogic, Tomcat, JBoss and Jetty.

• Configurable SLA parameters to ensure high performance and five-nine's availability for mission critical applications. When typical operational problems occur, including disk failures, code deadlocks, network and database slowdowns and outages, Ehcache ensures that the application can respond to meet predetermined and stringent SLAs.
• JTA support has been improved; delivering enhanced transactional support for Hibernate.