Archives: Press Releases

Mountain View and Oakland, Calif. – February 8, 2011 – Membase and CouchOne today announced they have joined forces to create Couchbase, the first and only provider of a comprehensive, end-to-end family of NoSQL database products. The merger yields an unmatched lineup of data management capabilities built with Apache CouchDB document database technology, memcached distributed caching technology and the Membase data flow and cluster management system. The new Couchbase product family, also introduced today, combines these capabilities creating solutions that scale from large clusters down to mobile phones and tablets.

News Highlights

• CouchOne, founded by CouchDB creator Damien Katz, provides database solutions powered by the Apache CouchDB database project. Known for its ease of use and reliability, CouchDB is the most widely deployed open source document database. As an open source project, it enjoys a vibrant development community and more than 10 million desktop deployments worldwide, as well as large-scale implementations at the BBC, Apple, and CERN.
• Membase, the company behind Membase open source technology, provides a distributed key-value database with integrated memcached caching technology. Membase enables dynamic cluster elasticity and sustained low-latency, high-throughput data operations. Its core technology powers 18 of the top 20 largest websites; and few web applications now enter production without it. Organizations including Zynga, AOL and ShareThis use Membase to dramatically lower data management costs while improving the scalability and performance of their demanding interactive web applications.
• With the merger of CouchOne and Membase, and the resulting combination of CouchDB, memcached and Membase technologies, Couchbase becomes the safest and most durable document database, with a recovery-oriented architecture that offers unprecedented reliability and availability for data, whether stored on a single server or spread across hundreds. Couchbase technologies represent the most comprehensive data management solution for building scalable web and mobile applications, with indexing, flexible querying and ease of use that developers love; and elastic clustering, robust storage management and consistently high performance relied on by system administrators and operators.
• The Couchbase product family, scheduled for release over the coming months, includes offerings optimized for the data center, desktop and mobile device. In addition to a consistent developer API across products, the Couchbase family will feature automatic end-to-end synchronization – supporting cross-datacenter replication and mobile-to-cloud database synchronization. The Couchbase family will include:
  • Elastic Couchbase [Membase Server]: Membase Server, to be renamed Elastic Couchbase in a forthcoming release, will combine Membase, memcached and CouchDB technology to provide high-performance caching, elastic clustering and document database features. It can effortlessly scale from a single server to a hundred-node cluster supporting an application with millions of concurrent users.
  • Couchbase Single Server: A lightweight, non-clustered Couchbase edition appropriate for developers and smaller Couchbase production deployments.
  • Mobile Couchbase: Initially focused on the iOS platform, Mobile Couchbase is a database embeddable into native iOS applications. Mobile Couchbase provides data management services to applications whether offline or on, and can be configured to automatically synchronize with other Couchbase instances when network connectivity is established.
  • Hosted Couchbase: Hosted Couchbase is a quick and easy way to get started with Couchbase, and provides a ready-made cloud sync point for applications built using Mobile Couchbase.
• Membase CEO Bob Wiederhold, becomes CEO of the combined company, with CouchOne CEO Damien Katz serving as Couchbase CTO. Couchbase headquarters is in Mountain View, Calif., with sales and development offices worldwide. The merged company will serve the mission-critical demands of developers and operations teams with proven, production-ready software backed by world-class support and services.

Supporting Quotes

“The merger of CouchOne and Membase creates a new powerhouse in NoSQL database technology. The union of our technologies is extremely exciting because it amplifies our respective strengths and fills our gaps. Further, the combined technical team, which will be led by Damien Katz, is nothing short of a NoSQL dream team, and positions us to more rapidly innovate, harden, and deliver high-quality data management solutions that will accelerate our customers’ success.”
— Bob Wiederhold, CEO, Membase

“To me, the most exciting thing about the Couchbase merger is that we are able to more quickly give users of both technologies the features they’ve been clamoring for. CouchDB users will acquire the high performance, high scale, simple-fast-elastic capabilities of Membase, while Membase users will acquire CouchDB’s indexing features (map/reduce view, Lucene, R-Tree GeoCouch), replication, reliability and a clear path to mobile integration. This is clearly a win-win-win for us and for our customers and users.”
— Damien Katz, co-founder and CEO of CouchOne and creator of CouchDB

“I’ve long held that the consolidation of NoSQL vendors was just a matter of time. I’m not surprised that the emerging winner in this process is Membase. We evaluated the gamut of NoSQL database offerings before ultimately selecting Membase at Zynga, but CouchDB was also a finalist. At that point we wished we could have combined the best of these systems, and that is exactly what is going to happen now. We’re delighted with this merger.”
— Cadir Lee, CTO, Zynga

“Membase and CouchOne were already two of the leading NoSQL database providers, and the combination of Membase’s high performance clustering and caching technology with CouchDB’s document data model appears to be a good fit. The two companies are also complementary in terms of their approach to developers and operational adoption, and Couchbase should be able to hit the ground running with their combined technologies, teams and development plans.”
— Matt Aslett, Senior Analyst, The 451 Group

“If you can live without joins, document data models make a lot of sense. For most of human history, the principal models for storing information have been document-oriented; today, many developers think in terms of objects, documents, or both. The Couchbase plan for a document-model DBMS is very interesting, especially in the variety of its scaling and replication capabilities.”
— Curt Monash, President of Monash Research and Editor of DBMS 2

“It has been a pleasure working with the team at Membase, both in my role as company advisor and in engagements between Cloudera and Membase. Bringing CouchOne and Membase together is a combination of technologies and companies that just makes sense. I definitely support this move and I’m looking forward to working closely with the combined team.”
— Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera

“Modern cloud applications require a robust and elastic database solution. The elasticity of Membase married to the robust document data model of CouchDB is a perfect match for these applications. The Couchbase merger strengthens our relationship with the company and enhances the value of the solutions we provide to our shared customers.”
— Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems

“We have a multi-faceted relationship with CouchOne – both using and distributing their CouchDB technologies through our popular personal cloud service Ubuntu One. The merger of CouchOne and Membase creates a stronger business partner with increased market presence and capacity for accelerated innovation. We applaud the combination and look forward to working with Couchbase.”
— Cristian Parrino, Director of Online Services, Canonical

More customer and partner quotes here

Mountain View, Calif. – December 1, 2010 – Membase, Inc., the company behind the Membase NoSQL database, today announced the first five meetups of 2011, following on the success of this quarter’s widely attended events. More cities will be added during the next few months. The events, organized in conjunction with local development community leaders, are designed to introduce developers to the simple, fast and elastic Membase NoSQL database, and provide in-depth information about technology architecture, use cases, development strategies and more. Membase is designed for interactive web applications where high performance and predictability are required.

Upcoming Meetups:

• San Diego – January 5, 2011 from 6-8 p.m. PT at North University Community Branch Library (co-hosted with the San Diego NoSQL Meetup Group)
• Denver/Boulder – January 12, 2011 from 6-9 p.m MT at the University of Colorado (co-organized by the Denver/Boulder BigData Group)
• Seattle – January 17, 2011 from 6-9 p.m. PT at Northwest Film Forum (co-organized by the Seattle Google Technology Users Group)
• Vancouver – January 18, 2011 from 6-8:30 p.m. PT at The Network Hub (co-organized by the Vancouver Ruby/Rails User Group)
• Chicago – January 24, 2011 from 6-9 p.m. CT at Morningstar (co-hosted by the Morningstar Tech Talk series and ChicagoDB)

Supporting Quote:

“As Membase developers and key contributors to the open source project, we appreciate the opportunity to visit local communities for an in-person exchange of information and ideas about non-relational technology in general, and Membase in particular,” said Matt Ingenthron, Membase developer and community manager. “We’re grateful to local community leaders for their support in organizing these meetup events, and are excited to meet developers face to face. It’s great to see accelerating interest in Membase within these vibrant technical communities.”

New York – October 12, 2010 – Hadoop World – Membase, Inc. (now Couchbase) and Cloudera today announced they have executed a partnership agreement and completed an integration of Membase Server with Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop (CDH). At Hadoop World today, AOL Advertising and ShareThis will deliver a presentation outlining how this integration has accelerated and increased the effectiveness of their ad targeting and serving platforms.

• Membase Server is a simple, fast, elastic, distributed NoSQL database management system, optimized for low-latency, high-volume data access by web applications.
• CDH is the most comprehensive platform available for accelerating the deployment of Apache-Hadoop.
• Ad (and other content) targeting systems must make complex decisions in a very small window of time – typically between 40-100 milliseconds.
• In consumer-facing web systems, many of these decisions are made in parallel.
• Minimizing input data load time leaves more time on the clock to make intelligent targeting decisions; with enough time, even complex real-time customization of ad content is possible.
• User, or cookie, profiles are standard input data to targeting systems

“The integration of Membase Server and the Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop dramatically increases the performance and effectiveness of ad targeting platforms like those in use at AOL and ShareThis, where sub-millisecond random access to a very large data set can lead to measurable increases in advertising effectiveness,” said James Phillips, co-founder and SVP of Products at Membase. “No other database system can maintain the low latency and high throughput characteristics of Membase. For a 2KB user profile, Membase can sustain mean random read and write latency of 300 microseconds with 99th percentile latency under 800 microseconds; and it can do it while scaling from a single node to a multi-hundred node cluster.”

CDH and Membase together provide the technology underpinnings to support ad, offer, and content targeting scenarios: 

• User profiles are generated using CDH.
• A stream of events associated with a given cookie or user is fed to CDH from Membase and other sources.
• Scheduled MapReduce jobs are used to process and transform these event streams into user profiles, which are fed in to Membase.
• Membase speeds delivery of the user profile data to the targeting logic, maximizing the amount of time the ad serving platform has for decision making and ad customization.

“AOL serves billions of impressions  per day from our ad serving platforms, and any incremental improvement in processing time translates to huge benefits in our ability to more effectively serve the ads to needed meet our contractual commitments,” said Pero Subasic, Chief Architect, AOL. “Traditional databases lack the scalability required to support our goal of five milliseconds per read/write. Creating user profiles with Hadoop, then serving them from Membase, reduces profile read and write access to under a millisecond, leaving the bulk of the processing time budget for improved targeting and customization.”

“Integrating with Membase Server  with Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop adds complementary functionality that customers are interested in,” said Mike Olson, Cloudera CEO. “The result is a highly optimized data delivery system with virtually no lag time. This real-time processing capability is essential for any solution on which split decisions must be made, including ad targeting and social gaming.”

AOL Chief Architect Pero Subasic and ShareThis Architect Manu Mukerji will join Membase co-founder James Phillips at Hadoop World later today to present “Better ad, offer and content targeting using Membase with Hadoop.” The session will be held at 1:45pm in Sutton South at the Hilton Hotel, NYC.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – October 11, 2010 – Membase, Inc., (formerly NorthScale), today delivered the first generally available release of Membase Server, the distributed NoSQL database that manages the data behind some of the most demanding interactive web applications, including FarmVille, the popular social game from Zynga played by millions of users daily. Simple, fast, and elastic, Membase Server fills a gap in the NoSQL market by providing a bridge from relational database technology to a scale-out data management model for interactive web applications. Working alongside relational database systems, Membase allows organizations to start where they are with existing technology and expertise and gradually evolve toward an elastic data layer.

Optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications, Membase scales out far more efficiently and cost effectively than a relational database, offering substantial cost, performance and scalability benefits. Built by the developers behind the Memcached project, who subsequently founded the Membase open source project, the Membase API is a superset of Memcached, the most widely deployed distributed key-value caching technology for web applications; as such, it inherits a thriving developer support community and mature, production-proven libraries for virtually every programming language and application.

News Highlights

• Membase, the simple, fast, elastic NoSQL database, is generally available today:
  • Membase Server Enterprise Edition is a certified distribution of Membase, available for download and purchase at membase.com. Annual product subscriptions start at $999 per node, granting a software use license and access to the Membase Network, which delivers software upgrades, hot fixes, maintenance releases and product support.
  • Membase Server Community Edition is a community binary, downloadable at  membase.org, where developers can also access and contribute to the source code.
• Membase has expanded its services offerings with a QuickStart package and other consulting services options for customers seeking assistance with design and implementation of scale-out data solutions.
• Membase is currently in production behind web applications at Zynga, NHN and Loggly, serving millions of users daily, and it is available through cloud service providers such as RightScale and Heroku
• Membase announced its sponsorship of local community Membase meetups for technical education and training.
  • The first meetup will be held in Zynga’s San Francisco offices on Thursday, October 28, 2010 from 6-9pm and will feature leaders of the Membase open source project, as well as a speaker from Zynga. Participants must register to attend.
  • Registration is also open for local Membase meetups in New York City, Boston  and Silicon Valley in early November, with other cities to follow.

Product Highlights

• Membase is simple
  • Takes five minutes or less to build a working cluster. Users can start with a single node and join nodes to a cluster with a single button press or REST call.
  • Key-value approach means no need to create and manage schemas, normalize, shard or tune the database before storing data.
  • 100% compatible with Memcached, inheriting its simplicity and ease of use.
• Membase is fast
  • The lowest latency, highest throughput NoSQL database technology available, providing predictable performance.
  • Quasi-deterministic latency and high sustained throughput ensure web applications get the data they need, when they need it.
  • Auto-migration of hot data to lowest latency storage technology (RAM, SSD, disk); multi-threaded; low lock contention.
• Membase is elastic
  • Scale-out architecture with auto-sharding enables customers to spread I/O and data across commodity servers or virtual machines, maintaining performance and growing costs linearly with increases in capacity.
  • Add and remove nodes from a live cluster, and even perform software upgrades, with zero application downtime and with sustained data operation throughput.
  • Highly extensible with plug pointsfor external systems such as full-text search indexing, data analytics and archiving.

Supporting Quotes

“As longtime users of Memcached, our team was excited about Membase as the logical next-step in data management, giving us a highly elastic database for scaling our user-tracking system while maintaining the simplicity and speed we’ve come to rely on with Memcached. Moreover, the switch to Membase was very simple, requiring minimal changes to code and infrastructure.”
— Manu Mukerji, Architect, ShareThis

“Our business is web-driven, and our success is rooted in the IT organization’s ability to connect health insurance companies with health care providers in real-time, without interruption of service. Membase gives us the ability to dynamically scale-out the data layer of our web-based application while ensuring high availability, which means we can consistently provide the levels of service our users expect.”
— Paul Vienneau, CTO and VP Engineering, NaviNet

“Loggly uses Membase NoSQL technology to drive real-time collection of logging traffic to facilitate aggregation and statistical analysis; it stores and tracks the amount of logging activity by user, by time, and by server. Membase is a great fit for our team because it is Memcached-compatible, making it easy to setup and use – it just works!”
— Jon Gifford, Chief Technology Officer, Loggly

“We’ve seen a swell in demand for Membase Server, even during beta, and we are thrilled to release Membase Server for general availability, and offer subscriptions and services that provide customers with the support they need for running Membase in production. From consumer web properties to more traditional enterprises, we are encountering growing numbers of companies that want to take advantage of the simplicity, speed, and scalability our technology offers for managing the data behind their interactive web applications.”
— Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO, Membase

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – October 4, 2010 – NorthScale, the company behind the Membase NoSQL database, today announced that it has been named an IDC Innovative Company to Watch Under $100M in the application development market. This achievement recognizes elastic data management software as a driver of change in application development today, helping companies improve the scalability and performance of web-based applications and cloud computing environments with innovative NoSQL database technology.

Since launching in March, NorthScale has hit all critical milestones to deliver a NoSQL database, Membase Server, that is simple to use, extremely fast, and highly elastic –  with predictability low latency that ensures applications are never kept waiting for data. Launched in June 2010 as an open source project with co-sponsors Zynga and Korea-based NHN, Membase is the database behind FarmVille, managing 500,000 operations per second.

“We’ve seen a marked increase in the interest and uptake of Membase, and IDC’s recognition underscores the importance of this new class of ‘scale-out’ data management technology,”said Bob Wiederhold, president and CEO, NorthScale. “Judging by heightened demand in the marketplace, customers with interactive web applications are clearly looking for alternatives to complement their relational database solutions, and Membase is well-positioned to meet that need.”

SANTA BARBARA and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – September 14, 2010 – RightScale^®, Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, and NorthScale, the elastic data management software company, today announced the availability of NorthScale’s Membase NoSQL database technology within the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Starting today, RightScale users can take advantage of NorthScale’s elastic data management software to cost-effectively and dynamically scale-out high-demand, elastic applications in a RightScale cloud management environment.

“The combination of RightScale’s automated cloud management with NorthScale’s high throughput, low-latency database creates an ideal solution for web applications with variable, extremely high scaling needs, such as social games,“ said Josh Fraser, vice president of Business Development at RightScale. “We are pleased to be able to extend our customers’ data management options with NorthScale’s cloud-friendly and cost-effective NoSQL database.“

“Along with speed and elasticity, simplicity was one of the key drivers for the design and development of Membase – we recognize that customer adoption and success begins with ease of use,“ said James Phillips, co-founder and senior vice president of products at NorthScale. “RightScale’s Cloud Management Platform and pre-packaged ServerTemplates make it even easier to deploy, manage and scale Membase in cloud-based environments.“

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform lets any organization tap the power of cloud computing for scalable, cost-effective IT infrastructure on demand, with complete control and portability. RightScale reduces the complexity of cloud deployments, enabling organizations to launch business-critical applications rapidly, without the risk of lock-in.

NorthScale provides a new class of data management technology that scales-out, dramatically lowering data management costs while improving the scalability and performance of interactive web applications. NorthScale Membase Server, is a simple, fast, elastic key-value database that stores web application data far more efficiently and cost effectively than it can be stored in a relational database, and enables organizations to deploy a highly available, cloud-friendly data layer that expands and rebalances dynamically as application needs change.

With the new cloud-ready NorthScale Membase ServerTemplate, RightScale users can now easily integrate NorthScale data management software as part of a high-performance, highly scalable and elastic cloud application in a RightScale-managed cloud environment.

Zynga, one of the world’s top social media companies, uses both the RightScale Cloud Management Platform and NorthScale Membase Server for many of its popular social games.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Velocity 2010 – June 23, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data management software, today established the membase open source project with co-founders Zynga and NHN. Membase is a simple, fast and elastic “NoSQL” database technology 100% compatible with memcached, the de facto standard for distributed object caching behind web applications. Optimized for storing the data behind interactive web applications, membase is an extremely low-latency, high-throughput system and delivers highly predictable performance unmatched by any other NoSQL solution. Initial source code was contributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

News Highlights

• Membase is an elastic key-value, “NoSQL” database optimized for storing web application data and delivering substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages over relational database technology.
• NorthScale today released the first public beta of its membase distribution, NorthScale Membase Server, available for download.
• For the tens of thousands of applications that already “speak membase,” through its memcached-compatibility guarantee, NorthScale provides a quick and easy way to try it out. 
• Membase.org is co-founded and co-sponsored by NorthScale, Zynga, the online gaming company, and NHN, Korea’s number one search and gaming portals. Both Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale Membase Server in production today behind applications that serve millions of users daily.
• NorthScale, which emerged from stealth in March 2010, was founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, a key-value caching technology at the core of 18 of the top 20 most heavily trafficked websites, and thousands of others.

Supporting Quotes

“Membase was built in the spirit of memcached: provide a simple, fast and infinitely scalable place to store web application data, leveraging commodity hardware. Without compromising these properties, membase adds durability, consistency and availability guarantees with support for dynamically adding servers to, and removing servers from, a running cluster. Using membase, even the world’s busiest web applications are never kept waiting for data.”
— James Phillips, Senior Vice President of Products, NorthScale

“Zynga’s objective was simple: we needed a database that could keep up with the challenging demands of our games while minimizing our average, fully-loaded cost per database operation – including capital equipment, management costs and developer productivity. We evaluated many NoSQL database technologies but all fell short of our stringent requirements. Our membase development efforts dovetailed with work being done at NorthScale and NHN and we’re delighted to contribute our code to the open source community and to sponsor continuing efforts to maintain and enhance the software.”
— Cadir Lee, Chief Technology Officer, Zynga

“NHN is proud to co-sponsor the membase open source project with NorthScale and Zynga. We are very proud of our collective efforts to define, drive and produce the software that we are now contributing to the open source community where we hope it will flourish and grow. As the operator of Korea’s number one search portal, Naver.com; the number one children’s portal, Jr.naver.com; and the number one gaming portal, Hangame.com; NHN collectively serves nearly 70 million unique users. It is imperative that we provide each of them with the user experience they deserve. Membase provides us with the predictable sustained performance we need to ensure responsive applications and satisfied users.”
— Chang Song, Chief Performance Architect, NHN

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Velocity 2010 – June 23, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data management software, today announced that Membase Server, a high-performance, high-availability NoSQL database, is downloadable now for beta testing. Membase is optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications, and does so far more efficiently and cost effectively than a relational database, with an uncompromising commitment to provide applications the data they need, without any waiting. Directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries, NorthScale Membase Server inherits the benefits of simplicity, speed, and elasticity that users enjoy with memcached, as well as the ability to leverage low-cost commodity hardware to scale-out the data layer.

News Highlights

• Membase Server, downloadable today for beta testing, is “drop-in compatible” with memcached, allowing the tens of thousands of applications already using memcached to quickly and easily begin leveraging membase.
• Membase Server is currently in production behind web applications at Zynga and NHN, which serve millions of users daily, and is deployed at other customer sites including Red Aril and mig33.
• NorthScale today also announced the launch of the membase open source project, along with founding co-sponsors Zynga and NHN.
• Membase Server was built by the leading contributors to open source memcached, which is today the de facto standard in web caching technology.

Product Highlights

• Membase is simple
  • Takes five minutes or less to build a working cluster. Users can start with a single node and join nodes to a cluster with the press of a button.
  • Key-value approach means no need to create and manage schemas, normalize, shard or tune the database.
  • 100% compatible with memcached, meaning virtually every language and application framework can already “speak membase.”
• Membase is fast
  • The lowest latency, highest throughput NoSQL database technology available, providing predictable performance.
  • Quasi-deterministic latency and throughput ensure web applications get the data they need, when they need it, meaning applications are never kept waiting for data.
  • Auto-migration of hot data to lowest latency storage technology (RAM, SSD, disk); multi-threaded; low lock contention.
• Membase is elastic
  • Scale-out architecture enables customers to spread I/O and data across commodity servers or virtual machines, maintaining performance with linear cost as a cluster grows.
  • Expand a live membase cluster by simply cloning an node and joining it to the cluster, while continuing to service application requests.
  • Highly extensible with plug points for external systems such as full-text search, data analytics or archiving.

Supporting Quotes

“There is clear interest from Web application and service providers in high-performance, scalable, distributed database technologies, and we see a good opportunity for products that provide users with a transition path towards a NoSQL database that complements, rather than replaces, their existing investments. NorthScale is well-positioned with Membase Server, given the widespread adoption of memcached, to provide a stepping-stone to encourage enterprises to adopt new distributed database approaches.”
— Matt Aslett, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Software, The 451 Group

“Across the NoSQL landscape, Membase stands head and shoulders above other alternatives, providing an easy onramp to a NoSQL database, especially for the thousands of organizations already using memcached. Further, Membase provides the best, most predictable performance for web applications – by a wide margin – ensuring snappy applications and happy application users. We’re thrilled to make publicly available this new class of data management software that provides blazing speed, is incredibly easy to install and use, and delivers great price/performance for storing data behind interactive web applications.”
— Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO, NorthScale

“mig33 has built a successful global mobile business from being one of the most downloaded mobile phone applications in the world. With more than 40 million users, supporting the growing user base is our first priority and it has become clear that our existing relational database technology can’t handle this alone. So we’re looking for an alternative that allows us to achieve our scalability objectives while avoiding heavy sharding and other data management gymnastics. We’re excited about working with NorthScale Membase Server’s beta offering as the solution for dynamic scalability and high performance, whilst being very easy to use and manage.”
— David McClure, Director of Engineering, mig33

“In our business, the most crucial success factor is the ability to decide which ad to serve and how much to pay for it, all in real-time with minimal latency – in fact, there’s a direct correlation between the speed of our decision system and our revenue. NorthScale Membase Server is a great fit for our needs, enabling us to create an elastic data layer that’s persistent, dynamically scalable and highly available, while giving us the sustained high performance our applications – and users – require.”
— Kiril Tsemekhman, Chief Scientist, Red Aril

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.

News Highlights

• 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 and 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.

Funding Highlights

• 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 and 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, Calif. – April 27, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data infrastructure software, today announced an update to NorthScale Memcached Server that adds support for the Debian package format, simplifying the download and implementation of the software for Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu. In addition, the company has tested and certified NorthScale Memcached Server on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and now officially supports that platform, which was announced today by Canonical. NorthScale Memcached Server is the preferred distribution of the open source memcached data caching technology, built and supported by the leaders of that open source project. Memcached enables organizations to alleviate database load, increase application performance, and reduce data management costs for their web-based applications.

With today’s announcement, NorthScale Memcached Server is now available via easily downloadable software packages for Windows, Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions supporting the .rpm and .deb package formats. Downloads are available at www.couchbase.com/downloads.

“The availability of NorthScale Memcached Server as a packaged distribution for both Linux and Windows makes it extremely easy to obtain, install, and implement the most widely deployed distribution of memcached,” said James Phillips, co-founder and chief strategy officer of NorthScale. “With NorthScale, in less than five minutes, customers begin to enjoy the scalability, performance, and cost-saving benefits of memcached for web applications and cloud environments.”

“Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is not only receiving enthusiastic ISV support, but from enterprises as well as Web and cloud deployments,” said Matt Asay, COO of Canonical. “We are delighted NorthScale Memcached Server is now certified and available for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, making its benefits available to our millions of users worldwide.”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 19, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data infrastructure software, today announced the company was named “Best in Show” at the 2010 Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud. James Phillips, NorthScale co-founder and chief strategy officer, presented to a panel of judges and an audience of several hundred technology insiders, both of which also selected NorthScale as the winner in the Data 2.0 category. NorthScale’s award-winning presentation can be found here.

“Under the Radar attracts the technology industry’s ‘A crowd’ and we congratulate NorthScale on the outstanding achievement of being named Best in Show by these technology aficianados,” said Debbie Landa, CEO and president of Dealmaker Media, the conference organizer. “This year’s Under the Radar: Cloud was a smashing success, with more than 350 technology leaders attending to watch more than 30 innovative companies that were hand-picked to tell their stories and showcase their technology. All of these companies are to be congratulated.”

“We are thrilled to be recognized as one of the leading innovators in cloud computing, and honored to be one of this year’s top winners,” said James Phillips. “NorthScale is investing heavily to remove one of the few remaining barriers to widespread adoption of the cloud within enterprise data centers (so-called private clouds). Our elastic data caching and database management technology mirrors what was built by Amazon and Google to enable their public cloud offerings, but is packaged, tested and supported to meet enterprise standards for deployment in the data centers of Global 2000 companies.”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 19, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data infrastructure software and winner of Best in Show at last week’s Under the Radar Conference, today announced an integration with leading cloud platform provider Heroku, making NorthScale Memcached available as an infrastructure service in Heroku’s growing catalog of cloud-based add-ons. NorthScale Memcached Server is key-value data caching technology that enables better performance and scalability of dynamic web applications, while alleviating database load and costs. It also provides a critical foundation for tackling scale-out data requirements in both public and private cloud computing environments.

“Using Heroku’s Memcached Add-On from NorthScale has enabled us to optimize the latency of our page rendering code, enabling us to build an advanced web app that is almost as responsive as an ordinary desktop app – something that would be very hard, if not impossible, to do without memcached,” said Niklas Holmgren, CEO and Founder of Bitspace.  The company provides an HTML5-based online music player and backup service for your music files, in the cloud.

“In just the first few weeks, we have seen hundreds of applications adopt the NorthScale Add-On, which points to the demand for cost-efficient, highly scalable data management in modern applications,” said Oren Teich, VP Heroku.  “We’ve enjoyed working very closely with NorthScale over the last several months, and have been blown away by the quality of the team, their software, and the interactions we’ve had with them to bring this memcached add-on to market. With over 50,000 applications running on our cloud service, it is imperative that every component of our infrastructure is rock solid, efficient and easily managed. NorthScale has delivered on all fronts.”

NorthScale Memcached Server delivers key-value caching technology in a manner consistent with the needs of cloud providers like Heroku, providing a secure, multi-tenant data management layer that dynamically expands and contracts to support fluctuations in numbers of users and application usage, while enabling instant provisioning of the data layer to accommodate new users.

“We are excited to be working with Heroku to satisfy customer demand for memcached and scale-out data solutions,” said James Phillips, NorthScale co-founder and chief strategy officer. “Our work with Heroku demonstrates the suitability of NorthScale’s elastic data solutions not only for cloud service providers, but also for enterprise IT organizations as they seek to build private clouds to match the flexibility and attractive cost economics achieved by public cloud computing service providers.”

Elastic data: A critical but oft overlooked ingredient for the cloud

There are four key categories of infrastructure software required for cloud computing architectures: (1) virtualization technology; (2) cloud automation software; (3) application framework; and (4) data framework. While the first three categories are well understood, a data framework that matches the scale-out nature of the cloud model is more elusive.

Modern applications are now routinely architected to “scale out,” perfectly matching the cloud model. However, most data is still being stored in relational database management technology (RDBMS), which was designed to scale up (not out), which presents limitations in the context of cloud computing. Elastic data solutions (those that scale-out) are needed to fill this gap, and hold the promise of enabling a fully-automated cloud that can seamlessly scale both application logic and the data behind the application.

“We are seeing significant interest in alternative database approaches, such as NorthScale’s, that are specifically designed and architected to take advantage of the elastic nature of the cloud, unlike relational database technologies,” said Matt Aslett, senior analyst, enterprise software, The 451 Group. “In particular, we expect to see enterprise adoption of technologies that provide an adoption path for IT organizations as they begin to scale out their data layer in support of web applications or private clouds.

The NorthScale Server Family of elastic data infrastructure software is a new class of data management technology that works alongside relational database systems, offering substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages for the vast majority of data associated with web applications and cloud computing environments. Based on the widely used memcached open source technology, the NorthScale Server Family 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. It includes:

• NorthScale Memcached Server, the preferred commercial distribution of memcached, created and supported by leaders of the memcached open source project; and
• NorthScale Membase Server, a high-performance, distributed, key-value database fully compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.

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; the number one children’s portal, Jr.naver.com; and the number one gaming portal, 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