The open source project, Memcached, is a common staple for many of the largest Web sites including facebook, twitter, wikipedia, and others. The enterprise software vendors haven entered the market and have added features that are more attractive to enterprise IT – especially to Java shops.

In recent months, we have had a significant uptick in client inquiries about distributed cache technologies and how they can be used to improve performance, scale, and reduce costs of Web and application architectures. We are also encountering distributed cache technology in conjunction with other platform technologies such as CEP. There is also an intriguing potential for distributed cache technology to become a staple of cloud computing environments (some might say amazon S3 has the properties of a distributed cache).

Based upon this increasing level of interest, the maturity of the products, and the potential of distributed caches to radically change they way applications are architected John Rymer and I have initiated a Forrester Wave evaluation of Distributed Cache technologies.Our current list of candidates to evaluate include:

  • Alichisoft NCache
  • Gemstone
  • Gigaspaces
  • IBM ExtremeScale
  • Memcached (we may also include Gear6 and Schooner since they support memcached)
  • Oracle Coherence
  • Red Hat
  • Terracotta

Are There Any Other Products We Should Include?

These are the products that we have encountered when speaking with both vendors and customers. Are there any others that you think should be on this list? For example, should Amazon S3 make our list or are there any other commercial products that are available?

We Would Love To Hear From Customers Who Are Using Any Of These Products.

If you are a client using any distributed cache technology we would like to speak with you about your experiences with these products and the business and technical requirements that drove you to implement the technology.

Please let us know.

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst

John R. Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst