Introducing Gear6 Memcached Services for Cloud Platforms

About a month ago, Brian Aker of Sun commented in a blog post about Amazon RDS and MySQL, "I'm surprised Memcached hasn't been done as a service yet."

Today, Gear6 has risen to this challenge with the launch of Gear6 Web Cache Server for Cloud. With this offering, which is available today on Amazon EC2, we introduced a number of "firsts":

1) Gear6 Web Cache Server for Cloud is the first commercial Memcached service for cloud platforms. That means Gear6 stands behind the offering and provides 24x7 commercial support. Implementing Memcached as a "roll your own" is hard enough, never mind doing it for the cloud.

2) Gear6 is the first Memcached service to leverage High-Memory Instances on Amazon EC2. Amazon recently introduced this new instance family, "designed for memory-intensive, high throughput workloads such as databases, memory caching, and rendering." In fact, the good folks at Amazon have been so supportive in how we're using High-Memory Instances, that they've written a blog post about it as well.

3) Gear6 is the first to use block storage interface, which gets us 100x cache capacity increase per AMI.

4) A Web GUI and REST interfaces for managing these cloud based Memcache instances, tailored for this unique environment.

The Gear6 Web Cache Server for Cloud takes our increasingly popular Memcached distribution and enhances it further for cloud platforms -- with the goal of giving customers more utility out of their cloud services. Today, if you're looking to scale your apps in the cloud, you can replicate your apps and databases (first image). Or you can use Memcached (and multiple instances of it) to decrease latency by offloading your apps and database (middle image). Gear6 Web Cache Server is focused on increasing the efficiency of every image, consolidating images and, as a result, decreasing costs (last image).

The Gear6 implementation of the Memcached server is more efficient at memory utilization than the current open-source community implementation. Up to 50% more efficient. That means you run fewerinstances for the same amount of useful cache, which directly translates to lower bills from the cloud provider.

The Gear6 Web Cache Server for Cloud also features an easy to use management and statistics Web GUI. So it's easy to see that it's working for you.

Memcached can accelerate your cloud-based application in myriad ways. Some example use cases are:

* The Memcached Functions for MySQL in customized SQL queries to check and cache the results of database lookups. This removes most of the pressure from the your database, by removing the database and thus the slow disk storage from the the opportunistic path, making your application faster and more scalable.
* Configure the Memcached module for PHP with "Enable Memcached session handler support" and then keep the PHP session information in Memcached instead of the database or filesystem. This will eliminate the common performance killing "hot session table in the database" problem, and will make your PHP user session based application faster and more scalable.

Still unsure? Try our 32-bit image for free (your only cost would be the usual EC2 costs paid to Amazon Web Services). When you're ready to go for more, try our 64-bit images, available in all the multiple standard and High-Memory Instance sizes.