We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. By now, we should have a clear idea of what happens when an ObjectGrid deployment starts. We have introduced the ObjectGrid deployment policy file and what its uses are. Shard types and placement are influenced by elements and attributes in the deployment policy file. Though it's not required, the deployment policy file unlocks a lot of eXtreme Scale's power. The deployment policy file also gives us control over a few things.
First, we have the power to partition our data sets. This lets us spread the load over many servers. We gain the power of all of the servers used to host the ObjectGrid instance. The deployment policy file also gives us control over replication and shard placement. It lets us define how many copies of shards should be kept and where they are located. We can place shards in specific racks (and even finer-grained placement than that if we want), in local or far-away data centers, based on the zone rules defined in the...