Tangosol vs Terracotta

Terracotta DSO uses a TCP/IP-based client/server architecture that consists of client-side instrumentation (byte code changes for "transparent clustering"), combined with a central server ("hub") for sharing state between application servers. In a Coherence cluster, the analogous components would be our free Coherence Data Client on the application servers, combined with any of our server-side editions (e.g. Coherence Caching Edition) as a fault-tolerant scale-out solution for state and data management.

Terracotta explains their clustering as follows:


Terracotta servers can be deployed as an active-Primary plus a passive-Secondary (i.e. 1 or numerous hot-standby(s)) - the hot-standby shares disk with the primary Terracotta Server. On failure of the primary, client-JVMs transparently connect to the standby.


Any my response:

For reference, this is one of the primary differences betweent Terracotta clustering and Tangosol clustering. Terracotta can cluster two servers (one hot, one standby) while Tangosol can run a couple thousand servers as "hot" (active + active + active + etc) in an n-way fully-connected mesh (virtual channels). Our server throughput in a 100-server system is 50x that of a hot+hot 2-server system, and (in a fully switched fabric) our throughput in a 1000-server system is 10x that of a 100-server system. And failover time (automatic, without data loss or interruption of application flow) is still typically sub-second.

Regarding the connections between the application servers and the Terracotta server, it is a TCP/IP client/server connection (no fundamental differences at the wire level from a Telnet session, JDBC connection or RMI). It is analogous to our free Data Client or our low-cost Real-Time Client.

Speaking for me personally, I would evaluate plugging Terracotta in through the TCP/IP connectivity (ours, theirs, whatever), because Terracotta has focused on the programming model (AOP, Spring, etc.), and it could be a good addition for working with data in a Data Grid.

--From link : http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/12/terracotta-jvm-clustering