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Gear6, a provider of enhanced Memcached solutions, has announced enhancements to the Memcached distributed memory caching system to scale both SQL and NoSQL applications.
On April 13, Gear6 announced a fully persistent Memcached distribution that provides native querying and enterprise-class operations via integration with Redis.
In an interview with eWEEK, Joaquin Ruiz, executive vice president of products at Gear6, said this announcement means that companies have the best of both worlds because with Gear6 they can accelerate structured/MySQL data sets in Gear6 Memcached and have the ability to query and filter objects at memory speeds; and deploy NoSQL architectures for operating on unstructured data sets (strings, lists and sets) in memory and have data persistence without the use a full-blown relational database management system (RBDMS).
“In today’s era of Big Data, companies need to have acceleration, persistence and operations capabilities,” Ruiz said in a statement. “Now in a single offering-Gear6 Web Cache-they have all three, and it supports more complex data structures with MySQL and NoSQL applications. With these new capabilities, Gear6 continues to push the envelope in advancing today’s scale-out Web architectures.”
Key value (KV) store technology has evolved beyond the store/retrieval level to the ops level, Ruiz said. Web 2.0 architectures not only require memory on-boarding/caching to reduce latency and persistence to save unstructured data sets, but also need in-memory data manipulation to provide meaningful access to the growing amount of unstructured/non-relational data sets, which, according to market research firm IDC, is growing three times faster than relational or structured data.
Over the last year, Gear6 has gained dozens of Web 2.0 customers by enhancing Memcached KV store technology with replication, persistence, elastic sizing, flash memory support and advanced cache management. With today’s release, Gear6 extends the KV capability of Gear6 products to include native regex queries for Memcached and will soon include advanced data operations via Redis integration. Sponsored by VMware, Redis is one the most prominent open-source KV stores to have emerged in the last year. It has been proven in the field in deployments such as Craigslist and The Guardian, Ruiz said.
“A lot of the top fast-growing Websites are customers of ours,” he said.
Gear6 Memcached supports the following key features:
– Advanced Memcached Query: In addition to the standard key queries, Gear6 Memcached can now execute parallel queries on regex matches against keys and values.
– Redis Integration and Support: A leading data structure server, Redis is used in conjunction with Memcached to build, develop and deploy Dynamic Data Services.
– Dynamic Services: Introduced in February, this feature is perfect for the dynamic nature of cloud computing services. It enables users to elastically grow and shrink an active Memcached pool without losing data.
– Persistence: Also introduced in February, persistence is now built into Gear6 Memcached, providing the ability to snapshot, import and export cache data. This feature is useful for cache warm-up and recovery and for analytics.
“People are finding out it’s great to have technology like Memcached,” Ruiz said. “But there’s all this unstructured data that’s hard to fit into a traditional database model, so we added persistence.”
Gear6’s Memcached distribution is available in several deployment options: as a software image, a prequalified HP solution or a cloud service.
In other news, Ruiz said the Gear6 Memcached distribution is now available as a DEB package for Ubuntu and Debian as well as RPM formats for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.
With this new delivery packaging, Gear6 further expands the deployment options for customers that run Memcached on a shared server infrastructure. The Gear6 Memcached distribution has been enhanced with enterprise capabilities for replication, persistence, elastic sizing, optimized memory utilization, advanced cache management and newly announced Memcached-native regex queries.
“Gear6 is a heavy user and fan of Ubuntu as a development environment,” Ruiz said in a statement. “Many of our customers are also heavily leveraging Ubuntu Server Edition infrastructure for their production data center and cloud environments where app server, caching and database server resources are shared. In order to meet their needs, we are releasing Gear6 Memcached as a native DEB package for the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition as well as previous generation Linux versions.”
“Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is receiving enthusiastic ISV [independent software vendor] support not only from enterprises but also Web and cloud deployments,” said Matt Asay, chief operating officer at Canonical, in a statement. “Scaling is the big challenge for these environments, so having the Gear6 Memcached product certified on Ubuntu is a great win for everyone.”