Redis is an in-memory key value store developed in C/C++ with clients for various programming languages like .NET, Java and C. Redis has features to tackle critical issues but falls short in some fundamental aspects. On the other hand, NCache is a .NET distributed caching solution which when compared with Redis, answers all these concerns effectively and also provides additional features which are absent in Redis, making it an ideal replacement.
The demand for high speed data access along with its integrity and fault tolerance is ever increasing in the contemporary application arena. Traditional disk based RDBMS systems have failed to answer these concerns in a comprehensive manner. This paved the way for in-memory data solutions which cover all the bases listed above.
Here’s why you want to use NCache as an alternative to Redis.
1 – WAN Replication
First and the foremost, Redis has no support for WAN replication of cached data. The need for this feature becomes indispensable when your application is deployed in multiple data centers across the country or the world. NCache provides powerful WAN replication capabilities for its distributed cache in the following data center configurations:
- Active – Passive
- Active – Active
The first situation is suitable when you have an active data center and a disaster recovery backup data center. The backup data center only becomes active if the active one goes down. For this to be possible, the distributed cache must be replicated to the passive data center so it is available when the data center becomes active.
The second situation is applicable where you have two active data centers serving geographically dispersed users in order to improve their access time. You want the ability to either re-route some of the traffic from one data center to another in case of an overflow. If one of the data centers goes down, you’ll want to route all its traffic to the other one.
In this second case, you need the distributed cache updates from both data centers to be replicated to the other ones and also handle conflict situations. These are the capabilities that NCache has which Redis does not support.
2 – Security & Encryption
Many of the applications needing a distributed cache are dealing with sensitive and highly confidential data. Therefore, security and encryption are two areas that hold fundamental importance when talking about data storage and retrieval.
Redis is lacking support for both authentication and encryption. NCache on the other hand, provides support for authentication and authorization through Active Directory / LDAP. NCache also provides very strong encryption options to encrypt the stored data. These options include:
- 3DES
- AES-128
- AES-192
- AES-256
Read more on NCache encryption here.
3 – Read-through & Write-through
Read-through and write-through are familiar concepts in the domain of distributed caching. But for people starting to get familiarized with caching it won’t hurt to give a brief definition for these.
Read-through means that your application always asks the cache for data and the cache gets it from your data source if it doesn’t have it. This simplifies your application code greatly because cache API is very simple to use in comparison to a database.
Similarly, write-through allows your application to write to the cache and the cache then writes the same data to the database either synchronously or asynchronously.
Both these features allow you to designate the distributed cache as your enterprise data store and have all applications read from it and write to it. The cache then deals with the database. This results in the cache always being synchronized with your database.
Despite its importance, Redis lacks this feature. NCache covers it in length and breadth.
4 – Cache Administration
The effectiveness of a distributed cache also depends on your ability to administer and monitor it through user friendly GUI tools. In this regard, Redis does not provide any GUI tools for its cache administration or monitoring. The only things available to you are the command line tools.
On the other hand, NCache provides powerful GUI based tools like NCache Manager and NCache Monitor for cache administration and monitoring. Some people however prefer to use command line tools because you can use them in scripts for automation. In this regard, NCache also provides all the cache administration through command line tools.
5 – ASP.NET View State Caching
View State is a powerful mechanism which ASP employs to store pages, controls and custom values between multiple HTTP requests across clients and the servers. This View State is passed in the form of an encrypted text which becomes very large in cases involving forms with lot of controls, Data Grid control or some other complex controls. This raises two concerns:
- Security risk
- Bandwidth usage
Both of these concerns will be answered if we have a distributed cache that can store the View State text and passes back an identifier that can be used to retrieve our View State from the store. NCache provides this exact functionality in the form of ASP.NET View State Caching whereas Redis does not.
6 – Memcached Smart Wrapper
Memcached is a popular distributed cache that is being used by a host of applications to benefit from the performance boost being discussed herein. It however has a number of limitations in the areas of high availability, data replication, cache elasticity, and ease of management.
The easiest way to address these issues for the customers using Memcached is to use NCache’s Memcached integration, such that the users can plug-in NCache to their existing Memcached applications without any code change. The users only need to change their application configuration files to take advantage of NCache’s distributed caching system.
Redis does not provide any such integration and hence falls behind on this as well.
Further Reading
For a feature by feature comparison of NCache with Redis, please take a look at the following link:
