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OSCON 2010 (BOOTH #322), PORTLAND, Ore. – July 21, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data infrastructure software, today released an updated version of membase. Unveiled as an open source project last month, membase is the distributed key-value database management system behind FarmVille. NorthScale will be demoing the “simple, fast, elastic” properties of membase at its booth, and later in the day, in a session led by membase project lead Matt Ingenthron.

Launched as an open source project in June 2010 by co-sponsors NorthScale, Zynga and NHN Korea, membase is optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users, creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with low, quasi-deterministic latency and high sustained throughput. Membase is protocol compatible with memcached, so it is easy to use and supported by virtually every programming language and application framework. It also provides memcached users with a seamless path to NoSQL database adoption, while preserving the simplicity, speed and elasticity they enjoy with memcached.

Notizie in evidenza

• NorthScale refreshed membase beta code today; new capabilities in the beta 2 release include:
  • Support for data sets that exceed the aggregated size of cluster main memory (storing “colder” data on disk only);
  • A rich array of real-time and historical statistics, with graphical presentation; and
  • A standalone membase proxy – NorthScale Moxi Server.
• NorthScale software engineer and membase project lead Matt Ingenthron will present a session entitled, “membase.org: The Simple, Fast, Elastic NoSQL Database Powering FarmVille is now an Open Source Project,” on Wednesday July 21 at 4:30 PM in Room E143. The talk will provide a technical overview of membase and its deployment behind some of the largest sites, as well as information about how to get involved in the project.
• NorthScale will demo this latest version of membase beta at booth #322 during OSCON expo hall hours today and Thursday, July 21-22.
• Of the hundreds of downloads of membase since its public beta release three weeks ago:
  • Over 50% came from online networks or directories, gaming sites or other consumer web properties;
  • Nearly 20% came from large financial service, telecom and healthcare firms, indicating that membase (and NoSQL technology, in general) has appeal beyond the web 2.0 world to enterprise environments; and
  • Outside the U.S., Japan ranked as the second largest geographic source for downloads.
• NorthScale engineers have contributed 90% of the membase source code to date. These engineers are also the leading contributors to the memcached, the world’s most widely deployed distributed data caching software.

Supporting Quote

“Does the world really need another NoSQL database? It’s a legitimate question. Before embarking on a project of this magnitude, NorthScale, Zynga and NHN carefully evaluated existing solutions to ensure the effort was warranted. Our collective need was focused: we wanted a simple, fast, elastic data management solution that could reliably store the data behind interactive web applications. It had to be easy to develop against and even easier to manage; provide consistently low latency with high throughput; and support dynamic reconfiguration of a live cluster, without impacting running applications. No existing solution came close to meeting all the criteria. So, more than 20-man years later, we introduced membase, and are now consumed by our mission to never keep an application waiting for data.”
— James Phillips, NorthScale Senior Vice President, Products

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – May 18, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of a new generation of elastic data infrastructure software, today announced it has secured $10 million in a Series B round of financing led by venture capital firm Mayfield Fund, with participation from Series A investors Accel Partners e North Bridge Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to continue the company’s investment in innovation around noSQL database technologies and drive market adoption of NorthScale’s family of scale-out data solutions for web applications and cloud computing. The company also announced that Bob Wiederhold has joined NorthScale as president and chief executive officer, bringing with him more than 25 years of high technology experience.

Punti salienti del finanziamento

• NorthScale, which emerged from stealth in March 2010, was founded by leaders of the open source memcached project, a data infrastructure technology at the core of 18 of the top 20 most heavily trafficked websites, and thousands of others.
• NorthScale is building on this foundation to deliver a new class of data management software – elastic data infrastructure – that offers substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages over relational database technology, for the vast majority of data associated with modern web applications and cloud computing environments.
• The new funding will be used to continue the company’s investment in noSQL database technology innovation and drive market adoption of NorthScale’s family of elastic data solutions, including NorthScale Memcached Server e NorthScale Membase Server.
• Mayfield Fund led the round, with pro rata investment by existing investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Mayfield Fund Managing Director Robin Vasan has joined NorthScale’s board of directors.

Bob Wiederhold Highlights

• Bob Wiederhold joins NorthScale as president and chief executive officer.
• Most recently, Bob served as chairman, CEO and president of Transitive Corporation, the leader in cross-platform virtualization, acquired by IBM in 2008.
• Bob brings more than two decades of senior management experience in software and services to NorthScale.  He has demonstrated continued success in managing privately funded companies from the start-up phase to multi-million dollar entities.  In addition to Transitive this includes:
• Cadence Design Systems, Inc., which he joined in 1985 as an early-stage start-up and helped grow to more than $1.5 billion during his 13 years in several executive management roles.
• Tality Corporation, whose revenues and size grew to almost $200 million and 1,500 employees worldwide during his tenure as president and CEO.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California - 27 aprile 2010 - NorthScale, Inc., fornitore leader di software per infrastrutture di dati elastiche, ha annunciato oggi un aggiornamento di NorthScale Memcached Server che aggiunge il supporto per il sistema di gestione dei dati. Debian semplificando il download e l'implementazione del software per i sistemi basati su Debian, come ad esempio Ubuntu. Inoltre, l'azienda ha testato e certificato NorthScale Memcached Server su Ubuntu 10.04 LTS e ora supporta ufficialmente questa piattaforma. Canonica. NorthScale Memcached Server è la distribuzione preferita della tecnologia open source di caching dei dati Memcached, costruita e supportata dai leader del progetto open source. Memcached consente alle aziende di alleggerire il carico dei database, aumentare le prestazioni delle applicazioni e ridurre i costi di gestione dei dati per le loro applicazioni basate sul Web.

Con l'annuncio di oggi, NorthScale Memcached Server è ora disponibile tramite pacchetti software facilmente scaricabili per Windows, Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu e altre distribuzioni Linux che supportano i formati .rpm e .deb. I download sono disponibili all'indirizzo www.couchbase.com/downloads.

"La disponibilità di NorthScale Memcached Server come distribuzione pacchettizzata per Linux e Windows rende estremamente facile ottenere, installare e implementare la distribuzione più diffusa di memcached", ha dichiarato James Phillips, co-fondatore e chief strategy officer di NorthScale. "Con NorthScale, in meno di cinque minuti, i clienti iniziano a godere dei vantaggi di scalabilità, prestazioni e risparmio di memcached per le applicazioni web e gli ambienti cloud".

"Ubuntu 10.04 LTS non solo sta ricevendo un entusiastico supporto da parte degli ISV, ma anche da parte delle imprese e delle implementazioni Web e cloud", ha dichiarato Matt Asay, COO di Canonical. "Siamo lieti che NorthScale Memcached Server sia ora certificato e disponibile per Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, rendendo i suoi vantaggi disponibili ai nostri milioni di utenti in tutto il mondo".

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California - 19 aprile 2010 - NorthScale, Inc., fornitore leader di software per infrastrutture dati elastiche, ha annunciato oggi di essere stata nominata "Best in Show" all'edizione 2010 dell'evento "The Best in Show". Sotto il radar: Commercializzazione del cloud. James Phillips, cofondatore e chief strategy officer di NorthScale, ha presentato la sua presentazione a una giuria e a un pubblico di diverse centinaia di addetti ai lavori del settore tecnologico, che hanno selezionato NorthScale come vincitore della categoria Data 2.0. La presentazione premiata di NorthScale può essere consultata qui.

"Under the Radar attira il 'pubblico di serie A' del settore tecnologico e ci congratuliamo con NorthScale per l'eccezionale risultato di essere stata nominata Best in Show da questi appassionati di tecnologia", ha dichiarato Debbie Landa, CEO e presidente di Dealmaker Media, organizzatore della conferenza. "L'edizione di quest'anno di Under the Radar: Cloud di quest'anno è stato un successo strepitoso, con oltre 350 leader tecnologici che hanno assistito a più di 30 aziende innovative selezionate per raccontare le loro storie e mostrare la loro tecnologia. A tutte queste aziende vanno le nostre congratulazioni".

"Siamo entusiasti di essere riconosciuti come uno dei principali innovatori nel cloud computing e onorati di essere tra i primi vincitori di quest'anno", ha dichiarato James Phillips. "NorthScale sta investendo molto per eliminare una delle poche barriere che ancora si frappongono all'adozione diffusa del cloud nei data center aziendali (i cosiddetti cloud privati). La nostra tecnologia di caching elastico dei dati e di gestione dei database rispecchia quanto costruito da Amazon e Google per abilitare le loro offerte di cloud pubblico, ma è confezionata, testata e supportata per soddisfare gli standard aziendali per l'implementazione nei data center delle aziende Global 2000".

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California - 19 aprile 2010 - NorthScale, Inc. è il fornitore leader di software per infrastrutture di dati elastiche e di vincitore del premio Best in Show alla conferenza Under the Radar della scorsa settimana, ha annunciato oggi un'integrazione con il fornitore leader di piattaforme cloud HerokuNorthScale Memcached è disponibile come servizio di infrastruttura nel crescente catalogo di componenti aggiuntivi basati su cloud di Heroku. NorthScale Memcached Server è una tecnologia di caching dei dati a valore-chiave che consente di migliorare le prestazioni e la scalabilità delle applicazioni web dinamiche, alleggerendo il carico e i costi dei database. Fornisce inoltre una base fondamentale per affrontare i requisiti di scalabilità dei dati in ambienti di cloud computing sia pubblici che privati.

"L'utilizzo del Memcached Add-On di Heroku di NorthScale ci ha permesso di ottimizzare la latenza del nostro codice di rendering delle pagine, consentendoci di realizzare un'applicazione web avanzata e reattiva quasi quanto una normale applicazione desktop, cosa che sarebbe molto difficile, se non impossibile, fare senza memcached", ha dichiarato Niklas Holmgren, CEO e fondatore di Bitspace. L'azienda fornisce un lettore musicale online basato su HTML5 e un servizio di backup dei file musicali nel cloud.

"Nelle prime settimane abbiamo visto centinaia di applicazioni adottare l'Add-On di NorthScale, il che dimostra la richiesta di una gestione dei dati efficiente in termini di costi e altamente scalabile nelle applicazioni moderne", ha dichiarato Oren Teich, VP Heroku. Abbiamo lavorato a stretto contatto con NorthScale negli ultimi mesi e siamo rimasti sbalorditi dalla qualità del team, del software e delle interazioni che abbiamo avuto con loro per portare questo add-on memcached sul mercato". Con oltre 50.000 applicazioni in esecuzione sul nostro servizio cloud, è fondamentale che ogni componente della nostra infrastruttura sia solido, efficiente e facilmente gestibile. NorthScale ci ha dato una mano su tutti i fronti".

NorthScale Memcached Server offre la tecnologia di caching key-value in modo coerente con le esigenze di provider cloud come Heroku, fornendo un livello di gestione dei dati sicuro e multi-tenant che si espande e si contrae dinamicamente per supportare le fluttuazioni del numero di utenti e dell'utilizzo delle applicazioni, consentendo al contempo il provisioning istantaneo del livello di dati per accogliere nuovi utenti.

"Siamo entusiasti di collaborare con Heroku per soddisfare la domanda dei clienti di soluzioni memcached e di dati scale-out", ha dichiarato James Phillips, cofondatore e chief strategy officer di NorthScale. "Il nostro lavoro con Heroku dimostra l'idoneità delle soluzioni di dati elastici di NorthScale non solo per i fornitori di servizi cloud, ma anche per le organizzazioni IT aziendali che cercano di costruire cloud privati in grado di eguagliare la flessibilità e l'interessante economia dei costi raggiunti dai fornitori di servizi di cloud computing pubblico".

Dati elastici: Un ingrediente critico ma spesso trascurato per il cloud

Le architetture di cloud computing richiedono quattro categorie chiave di software infrastrutturali: (1) tecnologia di virtualizzazione; (2) software di automazione del cloud; (3) framework applicativo e (4) framework dati. Mentre le prime tre categorie sono ben conosciute, un framework di dati che corrisponda alla natura scale-out del modello cloud è più sfuggente.

Le applicazioni moderne sono ormai di routine progettate per "scalare", in perfetta sintonia con il modello del cloud. Tuttavia, la maggior parte dei dati viene ancora archiviata nella tecnologia di gestione dei database relazionali (RDBMS), che è stata progettata per scalare verso l'alto (non verso il basso), il che presenta dei limiti nel contesto del cloud computing. Per colmare questa lacuna sono necessarie soluzioni di dati elastiche (che scalano verso l'esterno), che promettono di consentire un cloud completamente automatizzato in grado di scalare senza problemi sia la logica dell'applicazione sia i dati che la supportano.

"Stiamo riscontrando un notevole interesse per approcci alternativi ai database, come quello di NorthScale, che sono specificamente progettati e architettati per sfruttare la natura elastica del cloud, a differenza delle tecnologie dei database relazionali", ha dichiarato Matt Aslett, analista senior per il software aziendale di The 451 Group. In particolare, ci aspettiamo di vedere l'adozione da parte delle aziende di tecnologie che forniscono un percorso di adozione per le organizzazioni IT quando iniziano a scalare il loro livello di dati a supporto delle applicazioni web o dei cloud privati".

La famiglia di software per l'infrastruttura elastica dei dati NorthScale Server è una nuova classe di tecnologie per la gestione dei dati che si affianca ai sistemi di database relazionali, offrendo notevoli vantaggi in termini di costi, prestazioni e scalabilità per la maggior parte dei dati associati alle applicazioni web e agli ambienti di cloud computing. Basata sulla tecnologia open source memcached, ampiamente diffusa, la famiglia NorthScale Server è progettata per consentire ai clienti di partire da dove si trovano, con la tecnologia e l'esperienza dei database relazionali esistenti, e di evolvere gradualmente verso un'architettura di dati scale-out. Include:

• NorthScale Memcached Server, la distribuzione commerciale preferita di memcached, creata e supportata dai leader del progetto open source memcached; e
• NorthScale Membase Server, un database distribuito ad alte prestazioni con valori-chiave completamente compatibile con le API e le librerie client di memcached.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 16, 2010– NorthScale, Inc., a Silicon Valley software startup, today introduced a new generation of elastic data infrastructure software, optimized for the data management requirements of modern web applications and cloud computing environments. The company was founded by leaders of the memcached open source project – a data infrastructure technology at the core of 18 of the top 20 most heavily trafficked websites, and thousands of others. Building on this foundation, the NorthScale Server family of products represents a new class of data management technology offering substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages over relational database technology, for the vast majority of data associated with web applications.

“Zynga’s FarmVille, Café World, Mafia Wars and other games have over 235 million active users per month. We rely on technology from NorthScale to make that possible,” said Cadir Lee, Chief Technology Officer at Zynga. “As long-time users and members of the memcached community, we have tremendous respect for the team at NorthScale. Our internal development work to extend memcached clearly matched with their vision and we’ve worked closely with the team through the development of NorthScale Membase Server. We expect to improve the performance and availability of our games while reducing hardware and administration costs as we continue to transition data from relational databases to NorthScale Membase technology.”

New class of data begs for new class of database technology

In a recent white paper*, IDC estimates that “in 2012, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 2,500 exabytes [equivalent to 2,500 billion gigabytes], or 5 times that produced in 2008.” The white paper further identifies the growth of the Internet as a primary driver of this data explosion.

Today, web applications generate data at volumes far exceeding any other category of interactive software system, and for a much larger base of users. Much of this data, and the interaction patterns between software and data, differ fundamentally from those of transactional software systems such as payroll and ERP. In spite of the differences, relational database technology continues to be used as a “one size fits all” approach for both classes of software.

“Relational database technology has served us well for 40 years, and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future to support transactions requiring ACID guarantees. But a large, and increasingly dominant, class of software systems and data do not need those guarantees,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President with IDC. “Much of the data manipulated by Web applications have less strict transactional requirements but, for lack of a practical alternative, many IT teams continue to use relational technology, needlessly tolerating its cost and scalability limitations. For these applications and data, distributed key-value cache and database technologies such as NorthScale’s provide a promising alternative.”

“Relational database technology is intolerable overkill for the majority of data behind web applications – it’s like using an 18-wheeler when a delivery van will do the job,” said James Phillips, NorthScale Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. “NorthScale is providing the delivery van, introducing elastic data infrastructure software that is simple, fast, and infinitely scalable – matching the scale-out needs and architecture of modern web applications and compute clouds, and promising substantial reductions in related capital and operating costs.”

Introducing the NorthScale Server family of products

Introduced today, the NorthScale Server family of elastic data infrastructure software is designed to enable customers to start where they are, with existing relational database technology and expertise, and incrementally evolve toward a scale-out data architecture for their web applications. NorthScale products – NorthScale® Memcached Server™ and NorthScale® Membase Server™ – offer a practical, stepwise and seamless path forward.

First Step: NorthScale Memcached Server to Alleviate Database Load

NorthScale Memcached Server is an ideal starting point for IT teams adopting a scale-out data architecture for their web application and cloud computing infrastructures. NorthScale Memcached Server is an enhanced distribution of memcached, created and supported by the leading contributors to the memcached open source project. A distributed, in-memory caching technology, memcached is used alongside relational database technology – caching frequently used data, thereby reducing the number of database queries an application must perform. By augmenting versus replacing relational database technology, memcached is easy to adopt and offers immediate cost, performance and scalability benefits.

NorthScale has packaged memcached, making it easy to get, install and manage. The NorthScale Memcached Server is the only memcached distribution combining:

• Secure application multi-tenancy – securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster
• Dynamic cluster scaling – effortlessly expand a memcached cluster with automatic client updates
• Browser-based cluster administration – easily monitor and manage a memcached cluster<
• 100% “memcapable” certification – correctly and fully supports all protocols and operations
• First-class support for both Linux and Microsoft Windows technologies

“Operating Korea’s number one search portal, Naver.com; il portale numero uno per i bambini, Jr.naver.come il portale di gioco numero uno, Hangame.com; NHN collectively serves nearly 70 million unique users,” said Chang Song, Chief Performance Architect for NHN. “NorthScale Memcached Server will form the foundation of a shared data management infrastructure, supporting application development and production roll-out across divisions and business units. NorthScale’s multi-tenancy capabilities are particularly important in our environment. NHN is proud to have worked with NorthScale in the Open Source memcached community on both defining and implementing the facilities needed to support the expanding needs of our caching services.”

Next Step: NorthScale Membase Server for a Reliable, Persistent Database

NorthScale Membase Server is a high-performance, distributed key-value database that builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation. Directly compatible with memcached APIs and existing client libraries, NorthScale Membase Server provides a place to store web application data far more efficiently and cost effectively than it can be stored in a relational database.

While memcached reduces the number of reads an application must do from the database, data is still ultimately stored in the relational database. Using NorthScale Membase Server an organization can identify and gradually “drain” data from a relational system to Membase, enjoying the simple, fast and infinite properties of memcached across both reads and writes, while slashing data management costs. NorthScale Membase Server provides:

• Distributed key-value database – simple, fast, schema-free mechanism for storing data objects
• Infinite scalability – just add more commodity servers to expand data and IO capacity<
• Extremely high-performance – the speed of memcached for both reads and writes
• Tunable persistence behavior – optimize write patterns to match application needs
• Pluggable storage engine – store data on- or off-node, with user-replaceable storage subsystems
• Fully configurable data replication – data-layer fault tolerance for continuous application ops

Pricing and Availability

NorthScale Memcached Server™ software is available free of charge and may be downloaded from the NorthScale website. Subscription-based pricing for comprehensive maintenance and support plans starts at $799/server/year.

NorthScale Membase Server™ is currently deployed in select customer environments and will be available for public beta testing soon – those interested in participating may register here. Product availability and pricing will be announced in Q2 2010.

NorthScale also offers a Developer Kit free of charge that can be downloaded here.

About NorthScale

NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data infrastructure software, provides products that enable customers to dramatically lower costs while simultaneously improving the scalability and performance of their web applications. NorthScale is in production behind some of the world’s busiest web applications, including popular social games by Zynga, played by millions of users daily. It provides a shared data management platform for NHN, Korea’s largest web application operator with nearly 70 million unique users. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., NorthScale is a privately held company funded by Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

* An IDC White Paper – sponsored by EMC. As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands. May 2009