GEMSTONE SYSTEMS’ GEMFIRE ENTERPRISE 5.7 INCREASES DISTRIBUTED DATA RETRIEVAL PERFORMANCE BY 50 TO 100 PERCENT

GemFire Enterprise 5.7 boosts scalability, resiliency and performance of the data fabric while offering consistent response time under varied load.

Beaverton, Ore. - October 14, 2008 - GemStone Systems, the leading provider of the Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF), today announced the release of GemFire Enterprise 5.7, a core component of its high-performance data fabric.  The release adds significant value to customers that depend on a highly scalable, reliable, on-demand environment and simplifies the approach developers have previously taken to connect to the data fabric.

GemFire Enterprise 5.7 provides simplified server discovery and automatic load balancing to give customers enhanced business continuity and consistent response time, regardless of clients’ load.  Scalable client subscriptions guarantee data and event delivery, and network resiliency is increased by the quick detection and recovery from network failures or unresponsive servers in a distributed system.  In addition, the GFMon monitoring tool has been enhanced to simplify data collection and allow customized data charts for administrators.

"Data has been growing at an exponential rate for some time, and with virtualization and cloud computing coming into play, it’s like adding fuel to the fire," states Jags Ramnarayan, chief architect of Gemstone Systems.  "GemFire Enterprise 5.7 release raises the bar for delivering simple, scalable and resilient data fabric for our customers to cope with such data deluge."

Additionally, GemFire Enterprise 5.7 boosts the performance of the retrieval of data that is portioned across distributed systems by 50 to 100 percent – a great benefit to enterprises that are facing the challenges of increasing data volume and data transactions, and that are using disparate sources of data managed by different applications. 

GemFire Enterprise 5.7 is currently available; its new features include:

• Simplified Server Discovery and Automatic Load Balancing: A new server discovery service keeps continuous track of servers in the distributed system and the client load on individual servers. Clients can now connect to the discovery service and get automatically directed to the least loaded server. Additionally, GemFire Enterprise version 5.7 allows clients to transparently connect at runtime to a server that has comparatively less transaction load by using the server load metadata information from the server discovery service, boosting business continuity and providing consistent response time irrespective of client load.
• Server Grouping: A subset of running servers can be logically grouped together to grant control over the functionality of each group. This functionality enables administrators to classify servers in the distributed system based upon specific tasks. For example, a collection of specific data can be distributed only to a group of servers that directly connect to the relational database systems.
• Enhanced Monitoring Tool: The user friendly graphical user interface monitoring tool, GFMon, has been enhanced to provide custom data charts to view frequently used statistical data including data throughput rate, garbage collection information and data distribution across members. Administrators can also build custom chart templates to simplify data collections by users.
• Scalable Client Subscriptions: To guarantee data and event delivery to loosely connected clients or slow data receivers, the clients’ data and events can now overflow to the disk system once the storage capacity in memory reaches its limit. Besides providing durable data subscriptions, this enhancement provides consistent application response time by eliminating application throttling caused by slow data receivers.
• Network Resiliency: Improved resiliency provides fast detection and recovery  from network failures or unresponsive servers in the distributed system, ensuring that clients are not connecting to the servers that are not receiving data updates, thus providing a consistent and coherent view of the distributed data at all times.
• Performance Enhancements:  Data retrieval performance for the partitioned data in the distributed system has been boosted by 50-100%. Added support for bulk data operations for Java and native clients has further improved the in-memory data management performance.

About GemFire Enterprise

GemFire Enterprise, the Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF), provides a scalable, distributed platform to manage increasing volumes of enterprise data and streaming events with almost zero-latency.  With advanced data virtualization, distributed caching and distributed event processing capabilities, the GemFire Enterprise enables the delivery of actionable information to the right application at the right time.

About Gemstone Systems