The new offering includes a comprehensive transactions management framework, which ensures data consistency, data reliability and communication amongst data sources. It also includes a sophisticated, standards-based querying feature that enables applications to rapidly slice and dice information stored in data caches.

GemFire Enterprise solves data problems organizations face as new infrastructures, such as service-oriented architectures and grid computing, are deployed. As data simultaneously increases in volumes and becomes more distributed, firms are experiencing data overload, resulting in latency and a minimized view of data that often resides within multiple systems of varying data types.

"In this era of real-time data, latency is no longer seen as a minor hindrance, but rather as a mission critical component of operations," said Shankar Iyer, executive vice president, marketing and strategy, GemStone Systems. "GemFire Enterprise provides not only the means to solve latency, but also offers a comprehensive view of data that's spread across the enterprise."

The transactions framework now included with GemFire Enterprise 4.0 helps to simplify and provide transactional reliability within the data infrastructure. Organizations can use GemFire Enterprise as the sole transactions framework or as a complementary component within existing transaction environments, such as J2EE servers, regardless of the operating environment.

New querying functionality provides organizations with an enhanced and selective view of data, increasingly important as data volumes continue to grow exponentially and become distributed over multiple systems and applications. GemFire Enterprise allows for querying of data held in-memory, improving not only the view of data, but also speeding the process of accessing queried information.

In-memory technology has become an important component of the typical infrastructure environment as applications and systems become more dispersed, while data volumes continue to grow. GemStone differentiates itself from others in the market by not only moving data quickly, but by providing a virtualized view of data.

Additional functionality that will be incorporated in GemFire Enterprise 4.0:

• Cache server enhancements – dynamic addition and removal of regions and keeping data "alive" in regions even as applications join and leave the GemFire Enterprise distributed system.
• System Administration enhancements – simplified administration of locators, external processes, bridge servers and cache proxy.
• Region snapshots – a data snapshot of cache regions can be stored on disk and then reloaded into an application's process space.
• Grantor-based locking service – a grantor-based system replaces a distributed voting system for use in ensuring data consistency. This approach reduces network traffic and speeds up the locking process.