In distributed applications, object caching offers significant performance gains compared to direct database access. Historically, we have come to believe that performance and scalability are like two faces of the same coin; one can either get the system to perform better or have it optimized for scalability.
The use of distributed in-memory caching not only helps with performance, but also with scalability. If you cannot scale up then you have to scale out and that is exactly how distributed in-memory caching works for Windows Server AppFabric.
Note
Scale out, or the horizontal scaling, refers to the scalability approach that allows adding of new (compute and/or storage) nodes to the deployment to handle additional load; whereas with the traditional scale up approach to handle additional workload we add more memory and compute power to the existing compute node (server).
In Windows Server AppFabric Cache, the data is kept in-memory, but instead of limiting it to one server...