Industry veteran Persistence Software has announced version 7.0 of Powertier, its new J2EE 1.2 certified application server. Powertier was the first application server with a distributed shared object cache (entity bean cache across a cluster). Version 7.0 includes J2EE certification, and large improvements in failover and fault tolerance features.

Persistence Powertier 7.0 will be shipping August 27th.

Powertier 7.0 New features (confirmed via phone call with Powertiers Product Manager Michael Alderete):
 - J2EE 1.2 compliance.
 - Improved failover mode called "Federated Mode". Allows developers to explicitly specify failover paths. (ie: if server A goes down, re-route to server B, etc).
 - Transparent Failback. When a server in the cluster fails, it will automatically rejoin the cluster upon reboot.
 - Performance and resource management optimizations. DB Connection pools can be dynamically shrunk and grown.
 - Optimized database inserts for new entity creations.
 - Dynamic Data Routing. Entity data can be mapped to different databases dynamically based on entity bean attributes.

Press Release:
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SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 7, 2001--Persistence Software (Nasdaq:PRSW - news)

 - Dramatically Enhanced Platform Extends Enterprise Applications to Remote Locations at 5x Speed Over Competitive Offerings Without Hardware Upgrades
 - Compliance With Enterprise Java J2EE Platform Provides Corporate IT Managers With Standards-Based Reliability and Interoperability

The reach of the corporate network was dramatically extended today by Persistence® Software, Inc. (Nasdaq:PRSW - news) through the debut of its next generation PowerTier(TM) 7.0 J2EE-based application server platform boasting a 5x performance increase over competitive offerings. PowerTier 7.0 enables organizations to rapidly extend mission critical information and software applications in a controlled fashion to employees, customers and business partners around the world in real time without additional investments in data center infrastructure.

PowerTier 7.0 is ideally suited for ''extreme applications'' such as those found in financial services, e-businesses, telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. The high performance application server can also be utilized by virtually any organization seeking to make information more readily available to business locations on the edge of the corporate network, such as service centers, distribution facilities and sales offices. At the heart of PowerTier 7.0 is Persistence Software's patented Distributed Dynamic Caching(TM), the ''engine'' that intelligently manages, updates and synchronizes data for an entire organization and/or related constituencies. Distributed Dynamic Caching also enables the massive scalability and reliable sub-second response times necessary for demanding corporate environments or businesses built around the Internet.

''PowerTier allows companies to reach a much broader set of employees or customers rapidly, efficiently and confidently,'' said Ed Murrer, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Persistence Software. ''In today's economy, organizations must find ways to deliver increased productivity and value with fewer resources, and without additional capital equipment costs. We are fully compliant with Sun Microsystem's Enterprise Java J2EE standard, so we can maximize existing IT applications and infrastructure to speed business transactions.''

PowerTier enables the corporate enterprise to harness the full capabilities of their current applications while simultaneously providing the performance to drive new applications. Access to enterprise applications outside the corporate firewall is enabled via an HTTP tunneling feature, which allows controlled access from outside the enterprise while protecting mission critical applications, data and information behind the firewall.

In addition to its performance advantages over other application servers, PowerTier 7.0 provides an additional feature, enhanced failover, which helps organizations ensure systems continue delivering reliable service, even in when an individual network server fails or malfunctions. The enhanced PowerTier version also provides transparent failback, which enables network and IT managers to repair servers and bring them back into the network without disrupting service. By virtually eliminating network downtime PowerTier ensures employees and customers always have access to mission critical applications and information.

Persistence has improved the overall performance and sophistication of PowerTier's Distributed Dynamic Caching by optimizing database access with techniques such as database connection pooling and idle connection timeouts, creating new entities in a single database operation and sparse updates. Database connection pooling and idle connection timeouts ensure efficient use of server resources, while creating new entities in a single insert improves performance. Persistence's sparse updates capability guarantees that only changed data is sent between the application and database servers allowing for faster transactions. Additionally, as a J2EE certified application server, PowerTier 7.0 enables IT managers to take advantage of the rich array of software and services available in the J2EE market, while leveraging current developer expertise to reduce overall IT management costs.

ABOUT PERSISTENCE SOFTWARE

Persistence Software is the leading supplier of software and services based on patented Distributed Dynamic Caching(TM) to accelerate and extend business and Web services. Its solutions dramatically improve response time and scalability for some of the world's most demanding enterprise and Web applications. Persistence products include PowerTier, which dynamically caches corporate application data to speed business transactions, and Dynamai, which dynamically caches application-generated Web content to speed Internet transactions. Persistence Software's technology has been licensed to Cisco, Intel and Sun, and customers include Reuters Instinet, Sprint, Federal Express, JP Morgan, Sabre, and Celera. Persistence Software is headquartered in San Mateo, California. Go to http://www.persistence.com for more information.

What sort of a company makes you dial a phone number for an evaluation copy?

And no free developer licenses??

And the evaluation has to be run on WinNT???

Crazy stuff, considering their competitors.

Yeah, we're sorry about not having a downloadable eval right now. The service we were using to handle the online form went out of business (dot.bomb casualty), and so the form --> evaluation download process stopped working. (Yes, we know this is dumb; the entire web team has been replaced.)

We're building a new form handler, but if you really need the eval now, call the 800 number on the evaluation page:

http://www.persistence.com/powertier/devpit/index.html#EVAL

Michael Alderete
PowerTier Product Manager
Persistence Software

Just because some other company went out of business? Horrors.

As I dont live in the US its a tad tricky.

I'm waiting for the online option.

Nice to see some feedback though!

"Powertier was the first application server with a distributed shared object cache."

Who else has a distributed shared object cache?

Thanks!
-Mike Yost
mailto:mike@intersectsoft.com

You can look at http://www.orientechnologies.com for a shared object cache using JDO.

Orient is a DBMS, not AppServer. Thus can be integrated in any AppServer!

Bye, Lvc@