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Terracotta Announces Enhancements to Quartz Scheduler for Improved Management, Greater Control and Optimal Scale

Terracotta Extends the Value of the Most Widely-Used Java Job Scheduler; Simplifies Key Component of Cloud Orchestration

San Francisco—March 29, 2011—Terracotta, provider of some of the most widely used software for application scale and performance, today announced significant upgrades to Quartz, the market leading open source job scheduler that can be integrated with, or used alongside virtually any Java application. Improvements are centered on several key areas: ease of use, performance, management and monitoring, and control. The Terracotta team is investing in Quartz to meet the demand of its hundreds of thousands of open source and enterprise users, and extending its value with these new capabilities.

“Quartz has a well-established reputation as the most widely-used job scheduler; its lightweight properties and ease of use have made it very popular with Java developers,” said James House, founder of Quartz. “However, as enterprise applications become more complex, end-users are demanding more control of when and where jobs are executed. I'm pleased to see that Terracotta has made the investment to continue the improvement of open source Quartz and also produce a new commercial release of Quartz Scheduler that includes powerful enhancements. These new features enable enterprises to monitor and manage job scheduling from a GUI, and programmatically specify which machines to use for the execution of each job, thus maximizing compute resources without requiring extensive custom development or investment in more cumbersome, expensive job scheduling products.”

The new Quartz enhancements fall into three categories:

• Quartz 2.0: The new version of the core open source Quartz library features a simplified and more feature-rich API, with better performance;
• Quartz Manager: This web-based GUI enables the monitoring and management of job scheduling actions in production and development environments;
• Quartz Where: Built on the Terracotta platform, Quartz Where allows users to direct jobs to specific machines, or to any machine with specific available resources - a critical capability in distributed, heterogeneous clusters with large numbers of mission critical jobs. This enables the effective management of increasing workloads in traditional data center or cloud architectures.

“Our goal with this release is to extend the value of the industry’s de facto standard for Java job scheduling for the hundreds of thousands of users around the world,” said Mike Allen, head of product management, Terracotta. “With a simplified API, and tooling that provides greater visibility and control of the overall scheduling process, we are reducing development costs and enhancing operational control for groups ranging from small Java development shops to enterprise IT departments. When combined with Terracotta’s other performance and scale solutions, Quartz Scheduler provides a unique solution for cloud orchestration.”