Peer-to-Peer In-Memory Data Grid Unveiled by Tibco

TIBCO Software Inc. announced the availability of a peer-to-peer in-memory data grid, helping customers overcome the slow and rigid data storage and retrieval capabilities of traditional relational databases and disk-based data sharing solutions.

                TIBCO ActiveSpaces is a distributed peer-to-peer
                in-memory data grid that enables heterogeneous
                             applications to share, exchange,
                               and process data in real time.

The data grid is one of several products in a new product family – TIBCO ActiveSpaces Suite – that is being designed to provide fast shared memory for distributed applications to more quickly exchange and process real-time data, and for developers to exploit new relationships among messaging, data and business logic.

Disk-based relational databases are expensive to buy and configure and are not built to manage real-time events, while in-memory caches do not scale well across networks or provide the rich functionality required for today’s new breed of applications. By harnessing in-memory data as part of a shared, scalable data grid, ActiveSpaces Suite is planned to provide users with a new alternative that offers low-latency information access, corrects for data inconsistencies, and maintains integrity through transactional semantics. Because ActiveSpaces Suite is being designed to enable the notion of eventing, applications and systems are notified of any changes instantly rather than continually having to claw change information from databases – enabling decision-makers to have the right information quickly before the moment of truth.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces Suite
is planned to have three core elements
that allow enterprises to pick and choose what they need
in order to meet their specific requirements:

• TIBCO ActiveSpaces, which is available now and will be renamed TIBCO ActiveSpaces Data Grid, builds on a scalable peer-to-peer distribution model and provides the ability to store and analyze data in memory. Designed on the premise that today’s business is characterized by data in motion as well as data at rest, ActiveSpaces Data Grid enables high-throughput, low-latency data processing to support the generation, consumption and evaluation of events that continually influence business operations in real time.
• Businesses often need to insure data integrity and consistency even in situations where extreme speed is required and traditional transaction managers would not be practical. To be built on the Kabira Transaction Platform, TIBCO ActiveSpaces Transactions, which is scheduled to be available within the next 12 months, is being designed to meet this requirement by providing a fully distributed, in-memory transaction management mechanism. TIBCO acquired Kabira Technologies in late April for an undisclosed amount.
• Leveraging TIBCO’s acquisition of Netrics, TIBCO ActiveSpaces Patterns, which is scheduled to be available within the next 12 months, will greatly accelerate transforming, rationalizing and making business sense of very large and potentially inconsistent data sets. The need to analyze data at rates far beyond traditional data access methods has become key as enterprises deal with real-time, event-driven operations and decision analysis. Using continuous, in-memory matching and subscription capabilities, ActiveSpaces Patterns is being designed to provide mechanisms by which real-time data and event patterns can be evaluated appropriately matched even when the data is inconsistent and names or descriptions do not perfectly correlate.

"The new breed of applications our customers are building requires a new approach to the data problem," said Ram Menon, TIBCO’s executive VP of worldwide marketing. "The query-based model – where you need to keep asking the question against a database – is simply too slow when you are dealing with billions of events per day and need to react almost instantly."