Red Hat Adds Zing to High-Density Storage

Red Hat on Wednesday announced the addition of high-density storage capabilities to Red Hat JBoss Data Grid, its in-memory data management technology.

The company has expanded an alliance with Azul Systems to build on their prior collaboration to provide entitlements for Azul Zing with JBoss Data Grid subscriptions. The arrangement will help customers meet speed and volume needs for their big data environments.

The design of Azul's Zing runtime for Java supports high-performance on-heap storage, making it well-suited for JBoss Data Grid deployments that feature large in-memory data sets, according to Red Hat.

By providing Zing with JBoss Data Grid, Red Hat has extended support for persistent operation of Java instances that can manage up to 8 terabytes of memory. This memory design reduces the number of nodes needed in the cluster and simplifies deployment and management.

No new technology is involved in the high-density storage solution, according to William Oliviera, product manager of JBoss Data Grid at Red Hat.

"The technology we are using to help with this problem is Azul Zing, a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) that uses a 'pauseless' garbage collection, with the goal to provide a more predictable and consistent behavior," he told LinuxInsider.

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Significant Impact
The Red Hat/Azul partnership is significant for two reasons, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

First, it expands the options available to Red Hat customers for supporting their JBoss Data Grid deployments to include substantial in-memory resources via Azul Zing, he told LinuxInsider. That will be particularly welcome to organizations looking to maximize speed, up-time and performance consistency, while reducing costs and management complexity.

"The deal also casts light on the growing popularity of cloud-based in-memory solutions," King said.

Numerous circumstances and customers exist for whom dedicated in-memory clusters and appliances remain business-critical, he observed. Many others will find their needs fully met by services such as those provided by Red Hat and Azul.

"From what I can see, mainstream cloud platforms, including AWS and Google Cloud, offer support for JBOSS," King said. "In fact, AWS has done so for years. But I don't have a sense of the availability of in-memory options compared to what Red Hat and Azul are offering. Cost comparisons are a whole other thing, too."

Trash Collection Innovation
Azul's Zing C4 Garbage Collector (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) eliminates costly application execution hiccups that can be common in Java environments. The combination of JBoss Data Grid and Zing can offer consistent performance and scale, according to Red Hat.

Garbage collection pauses can cause inefficiency and added maintenance expenses in industries where speed, consistency of performance and uptime are important and data volume is increasing. That problem can worsen with the larger JVM heaps required for high-performance big data applications.

The Azul Zing JVM employs a "pauseless" garbage collection algorithm, noted George Gould, vice president for business development and partner alliances at Azul Systems.

"The collector's performance is independent of key applications metrics -- such as Java heap size, mutation rates, object allocation rates -- and it can provide highly consistent runtime execution for applications needing any size Java heaps," he told LinuxInsider, for example, from 1 GB to 8 TB for a single application instance.

Developing Needs
The memory technology resulted from customer use of applications that required large Java heaps but predictable garbage collection behavior and simplified tuning process. It targets customer use cases requiring larger in-memory footprints with a need for very low response times.