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Red Hat this week unveiled JBoss Data Grid 6.1, an update to its in-memory database, with significant new functionality for high availability and disaster recovery. Its first update in nearly a year, Red Hat's database for large-scale enterprise applications now supports data-center replication across geographically dispersed clusters as well as the ability to perform rolling upgrades without interrupting service.
[Related: Red Hat Taps Ex-Microsoftie To Lead OpenStack, Virtualization Efforts]
"When nodes are added or removed, there's very little impact on the grid," said Red Hat Technical Marketing Manager Shane Johnson, speaking on a JBoss Data Grid webinar. He was referring to nonblocking state transfer, a feature in Data Grid 6.1 that implements an all-new join-and-leave protocol for grid nodes that does not cause the system to pause. "Anybody who's encountered rehashing knows the consequences of it," he said, referring to the state transfer of prior editions. With NBST in Data Grid 6.1, the database will no longer be unable to respond to requests while it adjusts for a missing node. "It will continue to operate as it normally would and the state transfer takes place in the background."
This comes as welcome news to Simon Rice, database architect with Cintra, a data solutions provider based in New York. "That's a feature that has been needed in JBoss for a long time," said Rice, who has experience on systems that used JBoss Data Grid as a front-end caching layer for an Oracle back end. Background state transfer would be interesting to play with to see its effects on the database."
