The increasing demands of the customers is to build sites that scale when the traffic goes up and give superb performance. In the days of facebook launches and twitter invitations and previews, the traffic on the site becomes unpredictable. To be handle loads of traffic coming in, application architects need to exploit features that can help scale up the site.

One of the biggest challenges for a site that are heavily dependent on database, where to cache all that data.

To solve this issue, we have multiple products offerings in the market- Gigaspaces, Infinispan in the open source world. Vendors like IBM and Oracle have re-branded or released products like WebSphere extreme scale , Oracle In-Memory database.

For the discerning customers that are mostly IBM shops, the WebSphere extreme scale is a nice product that works very well with the existing WebSphere Stack of Applications. There are some good resources available on the same

IBM Redbooks: User's guide to WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Another upcoming good book is the IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale 6 by Anthony Chaves which promises to demystify the data grid concepts and their usage in the applications. I will post my review on the book pretty soon.