Red Hat announces the Enterprise Data Grid - official support for Infinispan at last!

One of the big announcements at the recently-passed JBoss World and Red Hat Summit conference/trade show held in Boston earlier this month was the new Enterprise Data Grid, abbreviated to EDG.  I mentioned this very briefly in my JBoss World recap, but the subject deserves more in-depth comment.

Firstly, what is EDG?  It is a data grid platform, based on the open source Infinispan project (and hence the relevance on this blog).  Just as Red Hat only offers support and subscriptions for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and not the community JBoss Application Server (AS) for its Java EE server offering, Red Hat will only offer support and subscriptions for EDG and not the community project, Infinispan.

I'm not going to go into details on the reasons behind this - this is well documented in other areas (RHEL vs. Fedora, JBoss EAP vs. JBoss AS, etc.) - and instead I'm going to talk about the first release of EDG, labeled EDG 6.0.

EDG 6.0 - codenamed Striding Edge, after the famous ridge on Helvellyn, in England's Lake District - is based on Infinispan 5.x, and in addition to Infinispan libraries, will also contain a runtime based on EAP 6.0.  A runtime?  Does a data grid really need a runtime?  Well, sometimes, yes.  If you are running a cluster of grid nodes and intend to access this cluster from a separate application tier, over a network, then there needs to be a mechanism to bootstrap that cluster.  Some of the latest innovations in AS 7 - the magic behind EAP 6.0 - give us the ability to efficiently bootstrap an Infinispan node with relevant server endpoints configured and running.

People have been asking for official support and consultancy around Infinispan for a long while now - over two years.  We finally have this, in the form of EDG.  If you are interested in getting on to an early access programme for EDG, and gain access to alpha and beta releases of EDG, register on this website.

Enjoy
Manik