IMDG technology has reached a notable level of maturity that has increased its industry adoption. IMDG technology provides a distributed, lightweight and a scalable memory object store. This memory object store allows multiple applications to run concurrently and perform the analytical or transactional operation at a lower latency. Thus, IMDGs help in maintaining durability of data grids across virtual and physical servers.

Features of IMDG technology

Transactional ACID Support

One of the distinguishing characteristics of IMDG technology is that it includes transactional ACID support. A 2-phase-commit protocol is typically used to ensure data consistency within a cluster. Different types of IMDGs have different underlying locking mechanisms. ACID support facilitates advanced implementations of locking mechanisms, reduces network chattiness to a minimum level, and provides high performance.

Key-Value Store

In-memory data grid has the ability to add nodes on demand in real-time. This technology has been developed to linearly scale to encompass hundreds of nodes with strong semantics for the purpose of data locality and affinity data routing. This helps in reducing redundant data noise. IMDG consists of a distributed key-value store. This key value store can be viewed as a distributed partitioned hash map that demonstrates nodes of every cluster owning a portion of the overall data. It helps in caching data from the cluster nodes we add. IMDG also supports replicated and partitioned data sets, which allows the analyst to freely cross query between data sets by using standard SQL syntax.

Tiered Storage

The IMDG architecture consists of a tiered storage model. In this storage model, data is stored and moved between:

• On-heap: a primary memory node where all cache entries are stored on heap
• Off-heap: a type of memory node that allows configuration of your cached store entries directly into off-heap storage.
• Swap space: a temporary storage node used when the data set exceeds the limits of on-heap and off-heap memory.

If you go up the tier, the architecture will provide you with increased data storage capacity, with a gradual increase in latency.

Integration with Existing Database

In-memory data grids provide scalability and speed up the working of functionalities of existing systems or applications. An In-Memory works with an existing database, it provides a layer of vastly distributed in-memory storage and processing between the database and the application. Applications rely on this layer for gaining fast data accessing and processing capabilities. In-Memory Data Grids provide a seamlessly read-through and write-through from and to databases. Thus, it facilitates easy integration with existing databases.

In the year 2015, the IMDG market was approximately worth of $600 million and by the end of the year 2018, it is expected to cross $1 billion. Several companies are utilizing IMDG technology by changing their core systems’ architectures to take advantage of the low-latency and transaction processing to suffice the growing big data requirements in an organization.