I've never used distributed caches/DHTs like memcached, jboss cache, ehcache, etc. I'm wondering which, if any, is appropriate for my use.

First, I'm not doing web applications (as most of these project seem to be geared towards web apps). I write servers (Order Management Systems actually) for financial trading firms. The servers themselves are not too complicated. They need to receive information (market data, orders, executions, etc.) rout them to their destination while possibly transforming some of these messages.

I am looking at these products to solve the following problems: * Safe repository of the state of the server. I'd rather build the logic of my application as a bunch of transformers (similar to Apache Camel) and store the state in a 'safe' place * This repository should be distributed: in case one of these data stores crashes, one or two more should be up and I should be able to switch to them seamlessly * This repository should be fast. Single digits milliseconds count here, in other words, systems which consume/process this data are automated systems, not humans clicking on links. This system needs to have high-throughput and low latency. By sending my data outside the process, I am necessarily slowing performance, but I am trying to balance absolute raw speed and absolute protection of data. * This repository should be safe. Similar to the point about several on-line backups, this system needs to write data to disk (potentially more than one disk).

I'd really like to stop writing my own 'transaction servers.' Am I correct to be looking into projects such as jboss cache, ehcache, etc.?

Thanks