Microsoft "Velocity" Distributed Cache

By Doug Holland (Intel) (235 posts) on June 5, 2008 at 5:43 am

Microsoft has announced the availability of a CTP of a forthcoming distributed cache technology that is currently known as Velocity. Using Velocity clients can be different machines or processes and access the cache as though it were a local cache when in fact the cache is distributed across one or more cache hosts. The Velocity team have a whitepaper available describing the project in detail and have indicated that a second CTP will be available in the October time frame in time for Microsoft PDC 2008.

Given the drive to service oriented architectures applications are becoming more distributed than ever and applications with components distributed across continents is not uncommon. When talking to the Velocity team at Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers conference this week, we discussed using Velocity to enable caching on application servers within an application that is geographically dispersed to this degree and how Velocity can keep these geographically dispersed cache hosts synchronized with each other. I'll be investigating this further and will blog on what I learn about Velocity as the project progresses towards the next CTP and the final RTM which is expected at some time next year.

Categories: Software Engineering

Comments (5)

June 6, 2008 8:57 AM PDT


Bill Bain		 I just wanted to point out that our company, ScaleOut Software, has been delivering fully featured, scalable, highly available distributed caching for .NET since January, 2005. The key features that Microsoft listed at TechEd for release in CTP2 and V1 (and others which will not be available in V1) are available today in ScaleOut StateServer. SOSS is also self-configuring and self-healing. Please see our Web site's press release for our response to the Velocity announcement. Thanks.
June 11, 2008 5:50 PM PDT


Nicholas		 Bill,

Your software isn't free, right? :)
June 12, 2008 11:40 AM PDT


Zack		 ScaleOut's software is NOT free, but free software is not always worth what you pay for it ;)
As someone not affiliated with them who has used their product for nearly two years I can attest to its quality. We have never had an issue with it. Time will tell how the Microsoft implementation turns out.
June 15, 2008 1:49 AM PDT


Roni		 do you know which licensing model it's going to be behind Microsoft velocity? If you search for something free then you can use Sharedcache which is fully managed code written in C#.
regards, roni
July 30, 2008 2:38 AM PDT


Paul Jones		 Microsoft Velocity only covers a small portion of what caching solutions providers like NCache are offering. Their recent discussions about their CTP release clearly indicate that they have a long way to go before they can actually consider themselves to be in the same league as the incumbents. There are many question marks over the entire project as of now and only time will reveal the true nature of the product.

In the meantime NCache has everything that any application needs as far as availability, performance and scalability are concerned. Our support staff is very diligent and highly praised for providing immediate and thorough help regarding any issue. To top it all off NCache is extremely easy to use. In fact in case of session caching it does not even require a code change.

Our product is mature and provides an immediate solution to the problems that developers face in terms of bottlenecks and single points of failure. Our enterprise/developer versions have a trial period of 60 days. We also have an absolutely free version called NCache Express for applications that run on a two node cluster (http://www.alachisoft.com/download.html).

Team NCache

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