Gear 6 Expands Memcached Cloud Offerings

Gear6 today announced a Web Cache Server for Cloud, offering a memcached service running atop the Amazon EC2 cloud compute platform. Memcached is an open source caching system that improves the performance of many large database-driven sites. That includes Facebook, where memcached is important enough that CEO Mark Zuckerberg can give seminars on the technology.

Memcached helps database performance by storing commonly requested data in memory. Since memcached is open source, developers are free to build their own implementations on cloud platforms like EC2. Gear6 says its service can simplify the deployment of memcached on EC2, and is the first cloud caching service to leverage Amazon's High-Memory Instances on Amazon EC2, which are designed for memory-intensive workloads. Gear 6 has supplied a use case featuring Glam Media.

“Memcached is the linchpin for any ‘web scale architecture’ where rapid dynamic data services are required," said Joaquin Ruiz, Executive Vice President of Products for Gear6. "As with data center-based Web 2.0 sites, cloud-based dynamic sites need to run from memory in order to deliver a satisfactory user experience. And Memcached is the most effective onramp to memory, period.”

For additional background on Gear 6, here's a look at our interview from Velocity 2009 with Bill Takacs, the company's Director of Product Development, whol spoke with us about the importance of memcached and how Gear 6 is approaching the market for memcached solutions. This video runs about 7 minutes, 30 seconds.