Gear6 Unveils Availability of Industry's First Extended Memcached Solution

Gear6 Web Cache Dramatically Reduces Number of Dedicated Memcached Servers Required

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – April 20, 2009 - Gear6 (www.Gear6.com) announced today the general availability of Gear6 Web Cache, a Memcached protocol-compliant solution more than a year in the making that helps fast growing media, social networking, content aggregation and other dynamic web sites scale more cost effectively.

Gear6 Web Cache reduces the costs of using Memcached servers, improves site performance by ensuring continuous data availability, and allows for better planning and scaling of Memcached operations through greater manageability. Gear6 is showcasing Gear6 Web Cache solution at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA at booth #218.

In a separate press release, Gear6 also announced today that Answers.com, MyYearBook.com and Veoh make up a group of initial customers successfully deploying Gear6 Web Cache in a production environment.

The Growth of the Dedicated Caching Tier
2008 was a milestone year for web traffic as the volume of consumer Internet traffic surpassed business traffic. One of the key drivers of consumer growth was the rise of dynamic media, social networking and content aggregation sites.

As dynamic, user-generated content increased, so did the need for a dedicated distributed caching tier, which reduces the number of web servers, application servers and databases required. The open source project Memcached quickly became the de facto standard for a distributed caching tier.

Primary research conducted by Gear6 shows that 85% of the top 20 sites on the web and 50% of the top 5,000 sites use Memcached.

“Many fast growing web sites have racks and racks of dedicated Memcached servers – sometimes as many as 35% of the total number of servers in production,” said Joaquin Ruiz, executive vice president of products at Gear6. “Gear6 Web Cache reduces the number of dedicated Memcached servers by over 70% while adding failover, replication and greater cache management capabilities.”

Announcing Gear6 Web Cache
This week at the MySQL Conference and Expo in booth #218, Gear6 is publicly showing for the first time Gear6 Web Cache. Gear6 Web Cache allows customers to fully leverage Memcached and makes website scaling considerably easier through features that include:

A high-density memory architecture allowing customers to deploy very large amounts of Memcached while minimizing cost, rack space and power requirements. Gear6 Web Cache enables hybrid cache architectures that incorporate both high-speed DRAM and large amounts of economical flash memory. Very large amounts of Memcached memory can be deployed per unit of rack space, while providing DRAM like cache performance without increasing latency.
High availability built into Gear6 Web Cache means users can safely scale their site without introducing availability concerns. Continuous service availability is provided through a clustered architecture with fail-over capabilities, and continuous data availability is provided via server-based replication.
Management and reporting features of Gear6 Web Cache make it easy for users to view, understand, manage and scale all aspects of Memcached operations.

Customer Benefits
Memcached users – especially media, social networking and content aggregation sites - use Gear6 Web Cache to reduce the number of Memcached servers, lower power consumption and lower operational expenses.

Statistics gained from beta and early users include:

Rack space required for a 400 Gbyte web cache solution goes from over 6U for a standard Memcached deployment to 2U for Gear6 Web Cache
Power consumption of a 400 Gbyte web cache solution goes from over 1,5000 watts with Memcached to under 500 watts with Gear6 Web Cache
Purchase & operational costs of 400 GB web cache solution over 3 years will go from $206,000 with Memcached to $68,000 with Gear6

Gear6 Community Involvement
Gear6 and its customers have benefited from the excellent work produced by the Memcached community. Gear6 is committed to contributing back to that community through a number of activities, including the release of several open source projects aimed at production Memcached deployments and ongoing application development.

Gear6 has developed and released:

Statsproxy for Memcached - a lightweight tool for viewing real-time Memcached stats from a browser without requiring any code changes or additional server resources.
Brutis for Memcached - a tool designed to exercise Memcached instances by providing reproducible performance data for comparison purposes.
Gear6 has also launched a developer forum, to help developers and users of Memcached exchange ideas, discuss use cases and keep abreast of new developments.

Gear6 maintains a Memcached Twitter feed at twitter.com/memcached.

Other Resources:
Gear6 has published on Slideshare.net a number of slide presentations:

About Gear6
Gear6 is the first and leading provider of scalable Memcached solutions, 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, 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. The company is privately held with investments from U.S. Venture Partners, InterWest and Horizon.

Press contact:
Nadja Blagojevic
415 875 7493
nadja@pageonepr.com