E-Commerce
Your mission-critical Web applications need to run seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and they need to deliver the responsiveness that your customers expect. E-commerce customers expect fast, uninterrupted access to their shopping carts to keep transactions flowing smoothly. On-line financial services customers need to know that their transactions can be prepared quickly and reliably prior to commitment. These are just a few examples of how Web session-data and application state information have become increasingly important. The way you manage it can make all the difference in whether you deliver on the service requirements of your business.
ScaleOut Software's distributed data grid products make it easy to boost application performance by storing fast-changing Web session-data directly in memory on your server farm. A distributed data grid gives you three important benefits:
- It lowers Web response times well below what you have come to expect from using a database server to host session-data and application state.
- It keeps response times low as you add servers and client load to your farm.
- It offloads your database or other storage server while keeping your data protected and highly available.
Check out our performance results to see how much distributed data grids can boost your Web site's performance.
Once you decide to take the next step and try out a data grid, you have to consider some key issues that affect your total cost of ownership. "Which product do I license? How hard is it to install? Do I have to modify my application to use it? How do I manage it?"
You might be surprised to learn just how easy it is to deploy and use a distributed data grid. Let us walk you through it.
Flexible, Cost-Effective Products
If you are just planning to store session-data in the data grid, you can save money by starting with ScaleOut SessionServer. This product has all the power of our distributed caching technology, and it's very easy to install and use.
To really see the full performance benefits of distributed data grids, you may want to select or upgrade to ScaleOut StateServer. This product adds comprehensive APIs that let your application directly store and retrieve objects in the distributed cache. Now you can fine tune performance to update some session-data only when your application decides to make a change. You can also store new types of data, such as cached catalog lists and product descriptions, for fast retrieval and to further offload your database server. Our Solutions for Developers page has more tips that you may find useful to maximize your application's performance.
Fast Installation
All of our products download and install the caching service on your Web server in about ten minutes. You just have to enter a license key and select the network that the data grid will use to communicate among the servers (usually your back-end network). Once you're done and have activated the caching service, it automatically creates a new cache or joins an existing distributed cache. Just repeat this process for all of your Web servers. They will instantly share data and make it available to all servers.
Simple Configuration
If you are storing ASP.NET session-data in the distributed cache, you just have to make a one-line change to the application's configuration file, and you're done. Now session-state will be automatically directed to the distributed data grid instead of to a database server, and you should start seeing much faster response times. Note: If your application has never used an "out-of-process" session-state store, you may have to do some extra work to make sure that session-data can be serialized, and you have to modify the configuration file to run on a Web farm. These are standard steps needed by all out-of-process stores, including both database servers and distributed caches.
Easy Management
ScaleOut Software's distributed data grid is designed to "install and forget." Once the grid is up and running, it automatically handles server or networking outages by "self-healing" around failed servers. The built-in distributed cache keeps extra copies of your data so that it is always protected. You also can easily add a new server to the farm. Once it joins the distributed data grid, stored objects are automatically migrated to it using "dynamic load-balancing."
ScaleOut Software products give you a comprehensive graphical management console that lets you see what each server in the distributed cache is doing. You can monitor and fully control each server from the console, which you can run on any remote desktop that is networked to the Web farm.
Also, the optional ScaleOut Management Pack™ gives you the ability to browse the cached data at any time, and to do fast parallel backup and restore operations. This further leverages the advantages of a distributed data grid.
When it's time to take down your Web servers for ongoing maintenance, for example, to install a new operating system update, you can command the caching service to leave the distributed cache with one key-click. Once the maintenance is done, the service can rejoin the distributed cache with one more key-click. It's that easy.
The bottom line is that ScaleOut Software's distributed data grids can give your Web site a big performance boost, and it's easy to install and use. Your customers, and your bottom line, will benefit. Download and give it a test drive today!
