Version 1.3 Adds Key API Capabilities

In addition to performance and reliability enhancements, version 1.3 contains exciting new features that expand ScaleOut StateServer’s capabilities. Support for large farms has been extended to allow up to 24 servers within a single distributed data store. Along with using ScaleOut StateServer to transparently store session-state, it is now easier than ever to cache an application’s workload data and make it available across a server farm. ScaleOut StateServer also now supports asynchronous event handling for object and session timeouts. The following sections explain these new features in more detail.

Cached Data Accessor

The new Cached Data Accessor APIs enable applications to easily use ScaleOut StateServer to cache data objects that are shared across a server farm. These APIs build upon ScaleOut StateServer’s Data Accessor APIs and handle the complexities inherent in caching global, application-level data in a server farm environment. Before ScaleOut StateServer, developers who wanted to store data in ASP.NET's cache or application state collections had to create their own mechanisms for sharing data and synchronizing access across the servers in their farm. The Cached Data Accessor stores shared data in a single, distributed cache effectively as if the memory were shared across the servers. Developers can access this shared cache with easy-to-use APIs, complete with object expiration and straightforward locking semantics. And because the data is stored in ScaleOut StateServer, this shared cache is highly scalable and always available.

Event Handling

Version 1.3 now lets applications catch asynchronous session and event timeouts so that session and application data can be examined and explicitly re-saved or removed after a timeout occurs. For example, session data can be saved to a database server awaiting a future login to provide very long term storage for user sessions. ScaleOut StateServer takes full advantage of its built-in scalability and high availability to automatically distribute the event handling load across the server farm and to ensure that timeout events are always delivered even if a server or network outage occurs.

Other Improvements

Version 1.3 also further optimizes the performance of its server-to-server communications and of remote client access, especially for large objects. (See a report on our latest performance results for server farms with up to 28 servers.) This release also contains numerous reliability improvements to handle additional scenarios of server and networking outages, and it dramatically improves support for slower 100 Mbps networks.

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