NEW GEMFIRE SUITE FROM GEMSTONE SYSTEMS

GemFire Manages The Data For Your Blade, Grid and STP Infrastructure

Beaverton, Ore.- Feb 3, 2003 - GemStone Systems today announced the new GemFire Suite, live data distribution and management software that optimizes data in motion across the hardware and software boundaries of your enterprise. GemFire’s pervasive interoperability improves the utilization and performance of your enterprise’s information systems, reducing costs, accelerating business processes, and allowing your entire company to do more with less.

“We understand that organizations are faced with the urgent need to reduce the cost of ownership, and still increase performance and efficiencies in operations from their existing systems and infrastructure”, said Richard Lamb, President, GemStone Systems. “GemFire technology is designed for businesses to reap the benefits from being able to rely on consistent, live data that is accessible, transparently shared and available in real-time. This enables organizations to grow their business, incorporate flexibility with changing market conditions, and further benefit from low costs of technology infrastructure.”

The GemFire Suite from GemStone

The GemFire Suite from GemStone is comprised of three core products: GemFire for SMP, GemFire for Blades and Distributed GemFire. The GemFire XML Integration Module is an add-on component of the GemFire Suite and is available for each of these three systems.

GemStone GemFire for SMP is designed for a symmetrical multi-processing environment. GemFire for SMP enables collocated applications on SMP machines to share objects and live data, so they run orders of magnitude faster than traditional technology and accelerate your business processes. It enables systems to interoperate across multiple processors, Java Virtual Machines, programming languages and applications.

The core functionality of GemFire SMP can be used at the heart of high-speed, single –machine applications like trading engines and market data systems. GemFire provides thread synchronization across virtual machine process boundaries and extends Java capabilities for business benefits.

GemStone GemFire for Blades provides high performance data virtualization for flexible, low-cost blade environments. As enterprises are rapidly deploying blade servers as a highly efficient and cost-effective infrastructure, GemFire for Blades extends the capabilities by providing data virtualization that allows collections of objects to be transparently shared across cluster environments.

Blade servers are architected to provide performance and density, but currently lack support for distributed, shared-memory based caching across the blades in a cluster. As a result, blade servers excel at stateless applications, which do not share application data or state at the speed of memory across process or blade boundaries. However, as an application’s data intensity increases, issues of state management and data sharing across blades introduce internode latencies that dramatically slow data access and thereby application performance. The GemFire for Blades software solves this problem by empowering a collection of blade servers with a distributed, shared-memory based cache, a data backplane managed as a single system image of the entire cluster. This global data virtualization scheme allows any application running on any blade to access relevant application data at the speed of memory without regard to where the data actually resides, thereby providing the ability to process even the most demanding stateful applications.

GemStone Distributed GemFire is a distributed, shared-memory based solution that integrates data from multiple sources in real-time, serving that data at high speed from automatically synchronized copies near the data consumers. Distributed GemFire creates a true virtualization environment that transparently combines all resources – SMP nodes, tightly connected clusters, and remote data centers – into a single system image that enables connectivity between business processes and unrestrained application access to distributed caching. The net result is that all users have instant access to these data resources across a distributed network.

At WAN (wide-area network) distances between data centers, Distributed GemFire offers efficient replication, immediate updates or invalidation’s, and high volume data transfer. Based on the JSR-107 (JCache) caching standard, Distributed GemFire provides policy based, declarative data integration on an Internet scale, providing data centers with disaster recovery and remote system monitoring analysis capabilities.

The GemFire XML Integration Module adds XML, Web services and HTTP capabilities to all GemFire suite products and to all applications using GemFire systems. The module enables aggregation of live data from many sources into an ultra high performance XML cache, optimizes it, transforms it, makes it available for manipulation and retrieval by applications, and proactively delivers the live data to applications across multiple processes/ Virtual Machines and multiple nodes. GemFire XML also reduces hardware and networking costs for enterprise-scale distributed, integrated XML applications.

GemFire for Industry Specific Solutions

The GemFire Suite from GemStone is a data distribution management software solution that provides tangible benefits to industry markets that rely on live and consistent data, such as financial services, telecommunications and the retail sector. The GemFire solution solves data integration issues by creating a high-speed data grid that can service all lines of business in real time. A crucial need for users within a financial services organization is the ability to access synchronized data that is always current. At the core of any financial transaction is a set of interdependent processes that must share and reconcile information rapidly in a distributed environment. Too much data in many different formats, however, can drastically reduce the effectiveness of a traditional financial system architecture. Speed, performance, accuracy and timeliness of data are critical components at any financial institution. GemFire provides an ideal medium for those processes in the financial services sector by providing one common format to access, view and manage these resources in real-time.

"In Financial Services, securities firms today are expected to do more with less, said Larry Tabb, Senior Strategy Advisor, TowerGroup. “The ability to improve performance and reduce cost of ownership of their existing infrastructure and business processes is greatly enhanced by having accurate, reliable, and consistent information that can be accessed and shared across multiple sources at in-memory speeds.”

The financial services industry shares data and communicate events at high speeds to benefit the users matching trades, tracking market changes, calculating risk, pricing portfolios and resolving settlement issues. GemFire’s extreme scalability and short, predictable response times in a distributed environment make it the ideal answer for firms struggling to meet real-time processing requirements within tight budgetary and staffing constraints.

Availability

GemFire for SMP and the GemFire XML Integration Module are available today. GemFire Distributed will be available mid-February 2003. GemFire for Blades will be available in Q2, 2003.

About GemStone Systems, Inc.

GemStone Systems is a privately held company with over 20 years of software experience in developing high performance object oriented technology and highly scalable systems for enterprise organizations. GemStone’s patented technology delivers the speed, performance and capabilities that enterprises need from the hardware and software they already own. Industry leading global organizations like Intercontinental Exchange Inc., JPMorgan Chase, UBS Warburg, BellSouth Telecommunications, eBucks and Orient Overseas Container Line depend on GemStone technology and expertise to build scalable, mission-critical applications that have set the standard in their industries, and given them the competitive edge to be increasingly profitable.

Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, GemStone sells and supports its solutions through its US sales force and a worldwide network of distributors. For detailed product and company information, please visit www.gemstone.com

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GemStone, GemFire SMP, GemFire for Blades, Distributed GemFire and GemFire XML Integration Module are registered trademarks of GemStone Systems, Inc. Other names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.