by Angela Guess
Ron Powell of BeyeNetwork recently interviewed Gary Nakamura, General Manager of Terracotta regarding Terracotta’s “in-memory” approach to Big Data. Nakamura explained, “We had a significant breakthrough with regard to our solution in the market – BigMemory. We have figured out a way to store terabytes of data on commodity RAM without the sacrifice or the residual effects of volatility of that kind of memory. The solution that we provide and the reason we say “in-memory data management for the enterprise” is that we don’t just store the data in-memory. We allow end customers to persist, search, distribute, manage and monitor their data – all the enterprise-class things that customers expect from a data management solution. Again, it’s all in-memory. That’s the big revolution. Instead of tens of millisecond access from a database, it’s microsecond access to large volumes of data.”
He continued, “We’re talking about tens of terabytes in-memory, so as much as a commodity machine can hold and multiples of those. Today, I think the biggest commodity machine you can buy is two terabytes of RAM on an HP machine or Dell machine. We’ve have a couple of those in our labs, we have tens of the one-terabyte machines, and we have hundreds of the 500 gigabyte machines. The reality of it is that the price of RAM has come down significantly and will continue to come down. The opportunity to store data very, very close to your application for this microsecond-level access is significant.”
photo credit: Terracotta
