mainly marketing articlle by cofiiunder What if you didn't have to do any of this funny business to get scalability and reliability? What if the JVM had access to a service that you could plug into to make its heap durable, arbitrarily large, and shared with every other JVM in your application tier? Enter Terracotta, network-attached, durable virtual heap for the JVM. In the spirit of full-disclosure, I'm a co-founder of Terracotta and work there as a software developer. Terracotta is an infrastructure service that is deployed as a stand-alone server plus a library that plugs into your existing JVMs and transparently clusters your JVM's heap. Terracotta makes some of your JVM heap shared via a network connection to the Terracotta server so that a bunch of JVMs can all access the shared heap as if it were local heap. You can think of it like a network-attached filesystem, but for your object data; see Figure 1.
James Hamilton has published a thorough summary of Facebook's Cassandra, another scalable key-value store for your perusal. It's open source and is described as a "BigTable data model running on a Dynamo-like infrastructure." Cassandra is used in Facebook as an email search system containing 25TB and over 100m mailboxes. # Google Code for Cassandra - A Structured Storage System on a P2P Network # SIGMOD 2008 Presentation. # Video Presentation at Facebook # Facebook Engineering Blog for Cassandra # Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores # Facebook Cassandra Architecture and Design by James Hamilton