I've been reading up on so-called "data grid" solutions for the Java platform including Terracotta, GigaSpaces and Coherence. I was wondering if anyone has real-world experience working any of these tools and could share their experience. I'm also really curious to know what scale of deployment people have worked with: are we talking 2-4 node clusters or have you worked with anything significantly larger than that?

I'm attracted to Terracotta because of its "drop in" support for Hibernate and Spring, both of which we use heavily. I also like the idea of how it decorates bytecode based on configuration and doesn't require you to program against a "grid API." I'm not aware of any advantages to tools which use the approach of an explicit API but would love to hear about them if they do in fact exist. :)

I've also spent time reading about memcached but am more interested in hearing feedback on these three specific solutions. I would be curious to hear how they measure up against memcached in the event someone has used both.