Enterprises continue to look for ways to maximize how they leverage their IT investments and ensure that mission-critical business processes and application environments are operational and have response times that exceed customer expectations. Below is an excerpt of a recent report that underscores the performance that can be obtained with IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale, an in-memory grid, and how distributed object caching is essential for elastic scalability. Read the Full Report: Scalable Caching in a Java Enterprise Environment with WebSphere eXtreme Scale. "The paradox of completing transactions faster with bigger and bigger data sets has been solved. IBM® WebSphere® eXtreme Scale V7 and IBM System x® hardware shattered the performance barrier that limited application scalability by introducing a linearly scalable high performance in-line cache to the database system. With this breakthrough new technology from IBM, developers can rapidly build a seamless, flexible in-memory data grid that scales out as their application scales unlocking them from being limited by the performance of the database. This article reports a benchmark where a synchronous in-line eXtreme Scale database cache improved client performance by 365% over direct database access. This had a peak throughput of over 2.46 million transactions per minute. Furthermore, CPU consumption on the database system was reduced by 75%, enabling other critical applications to use the newly freed database capacity to improve their performance as well. This new benchmark (called Fantasy Sports XS) simulates a world-wide, sports website where users create and manage a fantasy sports team and update personal preferences and options. An application of this scale and size presents significant challenge for administrators and developers because there is a need to scale in response to client demand increases. Utilizing WebSphere eXtreme Scale in these cases eliminates the concern of scaling the underlying database infrastructure as the eXtreme Scale grid scales in unison with the application independently of the database. Three unique benchmark configurations were used to firmly prove out these conclusions. First, a traditional OLTP topology is utilized where the application uses JPA persistence APIs to directly access a traditional database. Secondly, an eXtreme Scale grid is added, without any changes to the application because the same JPA persistence APIs are used. Finally, the advanced eXtreme Scale asynchronous write-behind technology is used to illustrate the benefits afforded by this type of optimization." Learn more about WebSphere eXtreme Scale: WebSphere eXtreme Scale V7.0 Online Information Center IBM Redbook: User’s Guide to WebSphere eXtreme Scale Get Started with WebSphere eXtreme Scale: Download Free Trial of WebSphere eXtreme Scale Use WebSphere eXtreme Scale on Amazon EC2 WebSphere eXtreme Scale V7.0 AMI Get Started Guide Explore with Blogs, Communities, Papers and more: WebSphere eXtreme Scale Wiki WebSphere eXtreme Scale Forum WebSphere eXtreme Scale You Tube Channel WebSphere eXtreme Transactions Processing (XTP) Developer Community