GemStone Systems™, the Leading Data Services Software Company Releases GemFire® Enterprise 3.5

GemFire Enterprise 3.5 Provides New Features to Enhance Performance, Scalability and Pluggability for Distributed Data Management in Mission-Critical Applications.

Beaverton, Oregon - January 11, 2005 - GemStone Systems, Inc., a leading infrastructure software company, today announced the availability of GemFire Enterprise 3.5, a data services solution that makes data available on demand to applications regardless of underlying data sources or formats. GemFire Enterprise 3.5 offers significant enhancements to provide better performance, scalability and pluggability which makes it a high-performance, highly available, scalable and standards-based data services solution for data access across distributed sources, data distribution across multiple clients, and data management across multiple formats.

"GemFire continues to be improved to meet the high demands of our customers that depend on high-performing, scalable applications. GemFire is customer-tested and has been developed in conjunction with deployment feedback from leading financial institutions on Wall Street and federal agencies," said Shankar Iyer, executive vice president of marketing and strategy. "This new version of the product further leverages the industry's fastest data distribution and caching technologies on which GemFire is built, and will provide a compelling solution for mission-critical programs in financial services, federal government, transportation and logistics."

New features include:

• Disk persistence and overflow regions
  • Regions can be configured using DiskWriteAttributes that allow data to overflow to disk or be persisted for recovery later
  • Uses an LRU algorithm to move the least recently used objects to disk
  • GemFire will automatically recover data from the disk files upon restart of the cache
• Enhanced hierarchical cache configuration
  • Hierarchical cache communication is bi-directional
  • Supports "loosely coupled caches" that eliminate network bottlenecks
  • Client caches can create, update and delete entries and have these events synchronously propagated to the server cache
• JMX based administration
  • Provides a JMX interface for management systems to administer the GemFire distributed system
  • A JMX agent provides both HTTP as well as RMI adapters for connectivity
  • Provides a management API for administering and monitoring the various GemFire components such as shared memory system managers, a distributed system and application processes that host GemFire caches
• Visual statistics display
  • Provides a powerful means to chart and correlate GemFire statistics
  • Monitors cache performance in real-time
  • Diagnoses complex problems and tunes the caches for better performance and scalability
• Security enhancements
  • Offers comprehensive support for SSL communications
  • Communications can be encrypted for added security
  • Standard J2SE security mechanisms are used so that customers can plug in their own compliant security providers and achieve desired security configurations
• C cache enhancements
  • A C process can survive the loss of shared memory and failover to a warm or hot standby seamlessly
  • The C cache interface supports putting/getting SMP objects from the cache, in addition to the previous support for byte-arrays
  • The C cache provides cache listener capability allowing C programs to be notified when data in the shared memory cache is changed
• Data serialization for Java applications
  • GemFire provides an interface that can be used in place of Java's standard object serialization
  • Allows faster and more compact data serialization than the standard Java serialization
• Non-blocking operations during recovery of mirrors
  • Mirrored regions no longer block other process while they are initializing
  • While operations within a region's process may block during its initialization, other processes are not affected and will continue to operate as normal

GemFire Enterprise connects to databases, application stores, analytic tools, messaging systems and mainframes, enabling the deployment of high-performance service-oriented architectures at significantly lower costs. Inserted into existing system architectures will result in reduced data latency bottlenecks, scalability of existing systems to a larger number of users, and increased performance for new application server, portal and integration deployments.

About GemStone Systems, Inc.

GemStone Systems is a privately held infrastructure software company that provides data services solutions for enterprise business architects and data infrastructure managers that are building, enhancing or simplifying access, distribution, integration and management of information within and across the enterprise. Founded in 1982, and with over 200 installed customers, GemStone is recognized worldwide for its unique competency and patented technology in object management, virtual memory architectures, high-performance caching, and data distribution technologies.