XuQa has selected Terracotta’s open source clusteringsolutions

SAN JOSE -- Terracotta, Inc., a leader in advanced enterprise Java scalability solutions, today announced that XuQa, a new, rapidly growing social network site with already nearly one million users, has selected Terracotta’s open source clustering solutions to enable scale-out of its Java gaming applications. XuQa has received wide acclaim for its innovative model that combines social networking with game dynamics, and gives people within the social network a way to gain status by winning contests.

XuQa cited Terracotta’s unique ability to lower operating costs while simultaneously increasing scalability as the key selection criteria in their decision. XuQa is one of a growing number of companies selecting Terracotta to complement lightweight containers such as Smartfox and open source ones like Tomcat, Geronimo, and Jetty, to achieve enterprise-level availability for their applications. XuQa is using the open source solution to cluster its increasingly popular poker game.

Prosper Nwankpa, CTO of XuQa, said, “We really needed to address our availability and scale-out issues quickly. Whatever we used had to be a solution that we could deploy quickly, and it could not disrupt the rapid pace of our new feature work. Terracotta solved the scale-out and availability problems and gave us a lot more time to work on customer-facing capabilities.”

XuQa found that Terracotta's runtime clustering solution provided a way to configure Java applications so that they share critical sections of memory inside of each JVM in a cluster with all the other servers in the cluster. In most cases, sharing data in this manner can dramatically reduce the development effort needed to cluster new or existing Java applications.

Ari Zilka, founder and CTO of Terracotta, explained, “Since our founding, Terracotta has been laser focused on lowering the effort required to build clustered applications.” He also pointed out that the introduction of the company's open source clustering software has driven several of the most popular open source frameworks to integrate with his company's clustering solution. Mr. Zilka explained further that, “the combination of runtime clustering and open source framework support means that XuQa and all our customers enjoy the freedom to run a low cost application stack of their own choosing. I am very happy to count XuQa's rapidly scaling application amongst our production success stories in open source.”

Many Players, Too Few Tables
Prior to using Terracotta, XuQa recognized that its poker game would be limited to hosting only about 4,000 concurrent users, with no provision for high availability. With Terracotta in place, the company can now seamlessly cluster its games and scale out their new, highly available gaming infrastructure in a modular way, to much higher scale, as its membership grows. As new poker players arrive, XuQa will always have tables available.

Since Terracotta does not use Java serialization, and only fine-grained object changes traverse the network, XuQa also anticipates significant performance advantages, reduced hardware costs and more efficient network utilization.

XuQa’s Nwankpa summarized, “I would never want to cluster any other way. Terracotta saved us time and money, and to a startup like XuQa this means a lot. Terracotta is the only vendor we paid for anything whatsoever, and the return on investment was immediate.”

About XuQa
XuQa (pronounced Zoo-Kah) is a giant online reality game played for fame and fortune between you, your friends, and 1,000,000 other players. May the best XuQan win! The site is completely free to play and enjoy. Visit us at http://www.xuqa.com.

About Terracotta, Inc.
Terracotta, Inc. is an open source provider of clustering that brings high availability and scalability to Java applications. Terracotta puts control back into the hands of application developers and operators by delivering simple clustering functionality which translates directly to faster time to market, increased return on investment, and lower total cost of ownership. Terracotta customers include industry leaders in the financial services and telecom sectors. Founded in 2003, Terracotta is a private firm headquartered in San Francisco. More information on the open source community can be found at www.terracotta.org, and more information on the company at www.terracottatech.com.

Terracotta, Inc., Terracotta, and the Terracotta stylized "T" logo are trademarks of Terracotta, Inc. Java and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for identification purposes.

Press Release - 2007-03-01 08:37:16