Gear6 Enables Cloud-Scale Apps on Amazon with Enhanced Memcached Service for the Cloud

First Memcached image to support Amazon EC2 High-Memory Instances and leverage cloud-based block storage for huge efficiency gains

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - December 8, 2009 - Gear6, the leading provider of Memcached solutions, today introduced Gear6 Web Cache Server for the Cloud. The new offering marks the industry’s first commercial Memcached offering for cloud platforms, and delivers dramatically higher memory efficiency. Additionally, Gear6 Web Cache Server is the only Memcached service for the cloud that can leverage cloud-based storage to increase cache depth by several orders of magnitude. Free and paid images are now available on Amazon EC2, with upcoming support for other cloud platforms.

With this latest offering, customers now have a full spectrum of deployment options for Gear6’s enhanced Memcached distro, including:

• An integrated turnkey appliance where maximum density and one-stop support for hardware and software is desired;
• A software download where choice of server platform (for new or repurposed hardware) is important; and now
• A cloud image where performance, utility and scaling of cloud-based applications and resources are essential.

Over the last five years, the web has seen huge growth in global user population and content in addition to various different access mechanisms including broadband and mobile – leading to an explosion of dynamic and personalized services that are straining current web architectures. Taking these dynamic services to the cloud brings an entire new set of challenges in scaling and performance.

“Memcached is the linchpin for any ‘web scale architecture’ where rapid dynamic data services are required. 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,” explained Joaquin Ruiz, Executive Vice President of Products for Gear6. “Amazon’s recently announced EC2 High Memory Instances were made for high throughput services like Memcached, and we are thrilled to be first to bring our enhanced Memcached server to AWS. Gear6 Web Cache is the only Memcached distro on the market that delivers these services on all major deployment platforms, from the data center to the cloud, with the best performance and maximum utility.”

Glam Media, the pioneer and global leader of Vertical Media connecting premium brand advertisers with millions of consumers, recently implemented Gear6 Web Cache to scale Glam.com, the largest online women’s network in the world, reducing rack space requirements and expenses by 75 percent (Editors: see Glam Media Scales with Gear6 Memcached Distribution). Glam Media also leverages Memcached in cloud environments to augment capacity for peak load scenarios.

Fernando Ruarte, co-founder, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Glam Media, commented: “Glam depends on Memcached both in the cloud and in our data centers in order to scale our fast growing sites. We use Gear6 Web Cache extensively for advanced Memcached functionality in our data center and we look forward to production use of Gear6’s Web Cache Server for our cloud deployments to significantly increase our cloud utility.”

Gear6 Web Cache Server for the Cloud offers capabilities and benefits in the following areas:

• Efficiency: Optimized memory management delivers up to 50 percent increase in DRAM efficiency per cloud image with no performance degradation. This enables more high speed cached data per cloud image.
• 100x cache depth: Transparent block-based cloud storage access enables a two-tiered caching mechanism resulting in orders of magnitude more utility per image. This capability is a unique feature of Gear6’s Memcached offering.
• Free and priced multi-sized images: Choose from 32- or 64-bit image sizes. 32-bit images are free (not including EC2 costs); priced 64-bit images support caches greater than 4GB.
  Ease-of-use: A comprehensive web GUI and REST interface provide ease-of-management and integration for cloud deployments. Historical cache information can be easily accessed for application debugging and optimization.
• 100% Memcapable: Gear6 Web Cache is Memcached protocol compliant.
• Commercial Support: Priced offerings include 24x7 email and phone support, including installation and trouble-shooting assistance.

Gear6 Web Cache for the Cloud is immediately available on Amazon EC2. For more information about this offer, visit www.gear6.com/memcached-product/cloud-aws, read more at the Gear6 Blog, or listen to today’s webinar "Memcached: Making the Cloud Scalable for Web 2.0".

To stay up-to-date on Memcached and Gear6, follow @g6memcached on Twitter.

About Gear6
Gear6 (www.gear6.com) introduced the first mission critical software distribution for Memcached, enabling high-growth media, social networking and content aggregation web sites to deliver and scale dynamic applications and content. By focusing on the emerging need for a dedicated Web caching tier, Gear6 solutions dramatically improve the scalability of web applications and databases, while improving quality of service and reducing infrastructure cost. Gear6’s flagship offering is Gear6 Web Cache, a Memcached protocol-compliant solution that enables web site developers and operators to scale web services and applications, to save money, rack space, power and time, to protect users and sites from failures and traffic spikes, and to manage all aspects of caching operations. Gear6 corporate headquarters are in Mountain View, California.

###

Media Contact
Daniel Schneider
Page One PR for Gear6
415.321.2346
daniel [at] pageonepr.com