Learn about why we built CloudTran and the key technology components
Application requirements have changed significantly over the last decade, and this triggers a change to infrastructure layers as well. Systems that previously brought stability and predictability to data sitting in databases don't meet requirements of today's data in transit, which is often moving between in-memory data grids, message payloads, and more. 
Today's infrastructure components, like CloudTran, focus on high-velocity interactions between data and multiple front-ends such as SOA services, e-commerce applications, and even smart devices like iPhones. By removing scalability bottlenecks and delivering the ultimate convenience to developers, CloudTran is a must-have enabler for any business-critical application.
So far, systems requiring high throughput and low latency have used the Oracle Coherence in-memory data grid to cache and scale. This incremental change to architecture has moved data one layer ahead and closer to the request as a quasi-in-memory database.
Turning this architecture inwards and utilizing Coherence to provide ACID transactional capabilities requires that grid data be persisted while maintaining high performance to incoming requests. Currently, applications either take an slow down waiting for updates to disks, or they sacrifice ACID and do asynchronous write-behind. Distributed databases and 2-phase commits make the dilemma even worse.
CloudTran is the industry's only solution for managing the complete data layer in distributed computing environments. We integrate Coherence with back-end data stores asynchronously AND provide ACID transactionality across the entire architecture. This means you can now have applications that run at "grid speed" but that still maintain reliable backup of all data in a disk-based data store.
The CloudTran Transaction Manager runs alongside Coherence and is integrated with TopLink. No special coding is required to use CloudTran; just a few entries to your persistence.xml file and one annotation change on entities. Since CloudTran acknowledges the Coherence grid as the system of record, all transactions are committed in the grid nodes first. Then, committed transactions are sent in parallel to multiple data stores asynchronously for persistent backup.
It's true that the old 2-Phase Commit ("2PC") protocol is slow, and it certainly wasn't designed for today's web architecture. CloudTran does not use 2PC and instead has invented a new way of handling ACID-property transactions across a highly distributed architecture. You can read more about the genesis of our 2PC replacement in this technical whitepaper.
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