Web Cache Universal Distro

Tuesday we announced the availability of the software only version of the Gear6 platform.   Traditionally we’ve packed our software, which is an enhanced version of Memcached, with an industry standard computing platform.    For those wondering why we chose to release just the software it boils down to nothing but customer choice.   For various reasons (existing vendor relationships, hardware platform standardization, etc.), many customers have asked to run our software on their existing hardware.  

So what was most interesting and challenging thing developing the release?  The biggest challenge was making the move to separate our software from our existing hardware platform.   Prior to last week Gear6 delivered its enhanced version of Memcached on an appliance. As you might imagine, most of this release was spent putting the build systems and test environments in place so we can build and test for each type platform we’ll support. The variance in computer components and drivers for those components, although they are “industry standard”, can vary widely from vendor to vendor.    In addition we work with two different SSD manufacturers and have to ensure we can integrate them into the target hardware platform.   This all added up to making some changes in the way we build our software.    Some of this work was underway from our efforts launching our Virtual Appliance.

To limit the scope of effort, we focused on platforms our customers use or platforms we’ve been requested to support.  The usual suspects: Dell, HP, Rackable, Supermicro.    We picked specific platforms from each of those vendors and set about leveraging our existing infrastructure to “write once and build many”.   The good news is we now have the systems and infrastructure to support a large variety of hardware platforms as long as it meets some base requirements.   Those requirements are 4GB of DRAM, 80GB SATA or IDE hard drive, and onboard NICs.    

The end result of this release?   Customers can now grab a more efficient Memached, with high availability features, and use it on their desired hardware.   This lowers TCO and enables you to squeeze more value out of your cache tier.   That translates into more revenue for your company.  So if you want to run our Memcachedd on your hardware drop us a line or register for a free trial version here www.gear6.com/memcached-distro.