Mark Harris
The Velocity blog is pimping the following.
Project “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. “Velocity” fuses memory across multiple computers to give a single unified cache view to applications.
And after listening to the latest Hanselminutes Podcast on Velocity it has me a interested.
I am currently working through the process of evaluating various Distributed Caching Options for the next version of an enterprise app that we are building, Velocity will go on the watch list.
This is something that has been seriously missing for most .net developers. The feature set is still being developed to include Cache Linq as mentioned on the Hanselman Podcast. The current CTP brings the following.
- Caches any serializable CLR object and provides access through simple cache APIs.
- Supports enterprise scale: tens to hundreds of computers.
- Configurable to run as a service accessed over the network or run embedded with the application.
- Supports common cache configurations.
- Supports dynamic scaling by adding new nodes.
- Configurable number of backup copies to provide high availability.
- Automatic load balancing.
- Integration with administration and monitoring tools such as ETW, System Center, etc.
- Provides tight integration with ASP.NET to be able to cache ASP.NET session data in the cache without having to write it to source databases. It can also be used as a cache for application data to be able to cache application data across the entire Web farm.
- Follows the cache-aside architecture (also known as Explicit Caching) for V1. That is, you must decide explicitly which objects to put/remove in your applications and “Velocity” does not synchronize with any source database automatically.
- Support for multiple client languages (for example, PHP, C#, C++, etc.).
Dare has a post on velocity’s finer points. Also check out the Velocity’s MSDN page and download and play with the bits.
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I know if you have a vps or server with Server Intellect they can implement this on your machine. I know a colleague who had them install on his server. I know it is still beta but looks promising.
Microsoft Velocity only covers a small portion of what caching solutions providers like NCache are offering. Their recent discussions about their CTP release clearly indicate that they have a long way to go before they can actually consider themselves to be in the same league as the incumbents. There are many question marks over the entire project as of now and only time will reveal the true nature of the product.
In the meantime NCache has everything that any application needs as far as availability, performance and scalability are concerned. Our support staff is very diligent and highly praised for providing immediate and thorough help regarding any issue. To top it all off NCache is extremely easy to use. In fact in case of session caching it does not even require a code change. If you notice the features that Velocity has promised are already available in NCache. It offers
• In-memory caching for single server or multi server configurations
• Read-through, write-through, and right behind operations
• Replicated Cache, Partitioned Cache, Client Cache, and Mirrored Cache
• Faster and more scalability than StateServer and MS SQL Server
• Distributed Output Cache
• Seamless integration with Nhibernate and Entlib
• Dynamic Clustering based on peer-to-peer architecture
• No single point of failure
NCache is mature and provides an immediate solution to the problems that developers face in terms of bottlenecks and single points of failure. Our enterprise/developer versions have a trial period of 60 days. We also have an absolutely free version called NCache Express for applications that run on a two node cluster (www.alachisoft.com/download.html).
Team NCache