Couchbase Optimizes Data Access for The Knot Inc.

Mountain View, Calif. – May 16, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that The Knot Inc. (NASDAQ: KNOT), the premier media company devoted to weddings, nesting and babies, has implemented Membase Server as a centralized caching solution to handle hundreds of millions of online visitors to its popular web properties. With Membase Server, The Knot is simplifying its data management process, accelerating data access and easily scaling out to keep pace with its growing user base.

News Highlights

• With hundreds of millions monthly page views, mostly database-driven, performance and scaling its applications were critical for The Knot’s operations. In its early years, The Knot built its own customized caching, but with web traffic reaching significant levels in recent years, the company turned to memcached, a fast, in-memory caching system, used by 18 of the top 20 websites for scalability at the data layer.
• While initially running its own memcached instances appeared to help, The Knot’s technical team realized quickly it was not a long-term solution: there were single points of failure, it required more resources than provisioned and it lacked an easy-to-use management interface.
• The Knot evaluated Membase Server, which was created by the core developers behind the memcached project, and found it solved all the company’s caching problems. Better yet, Membase Server shares memcached’s on-the-wire protocol, so it plugged easily into The Knot’s existing implementation.
• With Membase, The Knot finally had a simple, fast, elastic key value caching solution, optimized for low-latency, high-volume data access by web applications:
  • Fast—The use of high-availability replication and distributed nodes means Membase Server provided The Knot with superior speed and system stability.
  • Simple—The Knot’s team had Membase Server installed in 20 minutes. It was Windows compatible, so The Knot was able to leverage their .NET expertise. Additionally, a rich set of centralized and automated GUI and programmatic tools eases the pain of managing and monitoring the cache.
  • Elastic—Membase Server has the ability to run on multiple physical nodes and balance keys across those nodes. Each bucket can be provisioned by port to allow different teams a pre-determined amount of space. This enables The Knot to properly provision resources and to add more resources without impacting performance.

The Knot implemented Membase Server on six bare metal cache boxes in a 5+1 installation with up to 1TB of RAM. The set-up provides fast, fault-tolerant access to READ data from within The Knot’s app server environments.

Supporting Quotes

• Jason Sirota, director of application architecture, The Knot Inc.: “Getting Membase Server installed and operational couldn’t have been easier, as it required no change to our running applications. Couchbase has an extremely responsive and knowledgeable technical team and we look forward to our continued relationship as we implement indexed search and storage solutions in the near future.”
• Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase: “We’re thrilled that The Knot Inc. is using Membase Server for its reliable in-memory caching capabilities and managing hundreds of millions of data requests a month without downtime. Like hundreds of others, The Knot is discovering the benefits of Membase Server’s simplicity, speed, and elasticity for driving scalability and performance needed for ‘big user’ environments.”  

Additional Online Resources:

• Read more on The Knot’s Membase deployment
• Download Membase Server
• Download the technical white paper
• Read the Couchbase blog
• Follow @couchbase on Twitter