A data grid is a collection of servers that cooperatively manage a giant set of live data, and can work in parallel to search, process, aggregate and transact against that data. A Java Data Grid is a Data Grid that manages and works with large collections of Java objects.

Architecting a Java Data Grid requires "thinking differently". With potentially thousands of processors in a grid, business processes are no longer thought of in linear algorithmic terms, and locality of data becomes the primary requirement for scaling transactional throughput.