Terracotta, the open source company focused on enterprise Java application scalability and availability, has tweaked Ehcache, the high-performance distributed caching widgetry.

The new 2.1 release is said to be a significant upgrade.

CEO Amit Pandey says that since Terracotta took Ehcache over last August adoption has accelerated; it currently claims 50,000 users and 100 companies paying for the enterprise version of the stuff including Adobe, News Digital Media, a division of News Corporation, and Raytheon. The hundred signed up in the last four months.

Pandey figures Ehcache is now managing 250,000 apps in the Global 2000 and is shooting for a million.

He chalks the recent tickle up to Terracotta's investment in R&D; the 2.1 upgrade is the fourth in 10 months all reportedly in response to customer demands. He says some customers are now using Ehcache exclusively for caching and scaling applications seamlessly from a single computer to large virtualized data center environments and private clouds. He concedes there's market demand for scale-out.

"Ehcache and Hibernate users find that the combined value of established open source technology and simple configuration changes enables them to scale their applications to hundreds of nodes. It represents a non-disruptive, easier to use and more broadly applicable alternative to proprietary distributed caching technologies such as Oracle Coherence," he says.

Ehcache 2.1 adds a new plug-in enterprise monitor for real-time visibility and optimizing application performance; expanded support for WebSphere including a fully coherent, highly available and durable web session clustering solution; configurable SLA parameters to ensure high performance and 5nines availability for mission-critical applications; and improved JTA support delivering enhanced transactional support for Hibernate. All the tweaks are generally available in the company's freebie edition.