VMware, Terracotta To Scale Apps In The Cloud

Terracotta this week said it's partnering with VMware to leverage the power of applications in the cloud.

The supplier of the Terracotta memory management system for Java applications in some ways is a natural player in the cloud, where getting large sets of servers to work together on a single application is often a goal.

Terracotta links server memories with a system that treats random access memory as a shared pool. Terracotta uses the pool as a place to store software objects and data that are going to be used frequently by an application. The approach allows a Java software object -- or set of coded procedures and their related data -- to be unloaded from the database once, built into a functioning unit, and reused many times, rather than returning to the database each time the object is called.

Terracotta can be deployed on vSphere 4, VMware's data center management system that manages a broad set of physical resources as virtualized infrastructure. The Terracotta/VMware combination could be deployed to manage an application or several applications in an existing data center by leveraging a server cluster there in a cloud-like manner, CEO Amit Pandey said in an interview.

"When the application traffic grows, you don't need to have more databases. VSphere 4 starts up more virtual machines," and Terracotta supplies them with the data already unloaded from the database, to scale up an application more quickly.

"We can scale [the application] up or down with the VMware instances," Pandey said.

VMware and Terracotta have tested their products together and established best practices for deploying them together, Pandey said. His company has been demonstrating the pairing during the JavaOne show this week in San Francisco. It's a combination that may one day be offered in public clouds as well being available to establish private cloud computing, he added.

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