Terracotta has taken its Ehcache Java caching component to scale with a new version that can store more than a terabyte of data in memory.

Ehcache 2.2, released today, provides over a terabyte of storage out of the box with support for hundreds of millions of entries, said Amit Pandey, CEO of Terracotta. Java developers can invoke the caching with two lines of configuration in Ehcache, he said.

Terracotta acquired Ehcache open-source project in August 2009. Ehcache, available in both open-source and commercial versions, can be bundled with Java products, including Hibernate ORM and the Spring Framework.

The company estimates that over 250,000 copies of applications are using Ehcache. At least 1,000 have already gone into a distributed mode of deployment, Pandey said. Ehcache takes the “elbow grease” out of deploying a high-scale system, Pandey said. Developers using competing distributed caching solutions find it difficult to move beyond two applications because they are too hard to use and require custom coding, he claimed.

Ehcache 2.2’s commercial pricing ranges from US$1,000 per node to $4,000 per application node. The commercial edition includes more operations and management-oriented features than the open-source product, Pandey noted.

Other new features found only in the commercial edition include deeper visibility and control in the Ehcache management console, with the addition of the Quartz Scheduler and Web Sessions open-source job scheduling services. The console also provides a single view of cluster-wide events to help operators identify problem nodes and diagnose performance problems.

The company also focused on enabling scenarios where customers use multiple data centers by enabling cache replication among clusters in disparate geographic areas.

A common runtime library is meant to reduce memory usage and network connections. It also exposes an API that programmers can use alongside the Ehcache API to perform complex inter-process coordination tasks across multiple machines with just a few lines of code, according to the company.