Archives: Press Releases

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

Mountain View, Calif. – May 10, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created via the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced the inaugural CouchConf developer conference, which will take place Friday, July 29 at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco, with O’Reilly Media as the charter sponsor for the event. Registration for the event is now open.

“This one-day event is for any developer who wants to take a deeper dive into Couch technology, learn where it’s headed and build really cool stuff. We invite all developers to join us for a day in San Francisco to find out what’s new with Couch and learn more about harnessing this powerful technology for web and mobile applications,” said Damien Katz, Couchbase CTO and creator of Apache CouchDB. “We also want to thank O’Reilly Media for being our charter sponsor at this inaugural CouchConf event.”

Conference Highlights Include:

• Technology announcements and look ahead. Damien Katz and other Couchbase technologists will share the latest developments in Couch technology, with updates on the integration of Membase and CouchDB.
• Technically rich agenda. The day is packed with core and advanced breakouts tailored for both new and experienced users developing and deploying Couch-based applications. Sessions cover CouchDB, Membase Server, Mobile Couchbase, and related technologies.
• Pre-Conference Training. Two-day hands-on training is available in San Francisco just prior to the conference (July 27-28); training students attend CouchConf free of charge.
• The Couchbase Lounge. Throughout the conference, a designated area will be available for attendees to get hands-on support, network with one another, and hack together.
• Couch Developer Awards. Recognizing innovative use of Couch technology, the first-ever Couch Developer Awards will be announced at the closing session of the conference. Project nominations are underway now through July 15, 2011.
• Early bird pricing is now available. CouchConf San Francisco registration is now open with early bird pricing in effect until June 17, 2011.

Additional Online Resources

• Register for CouchConf San Francisco
• Sponsor CouchConf San Francisco
• Register for pre-conference training: CouchDB Developer Training or Membase Server Ops Training
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter

Boston, Mass. – Summit 2011 – May 4, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created by the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced it is partnering with Red Hat to deliver Couchbase’s simple, fast, elastic database technology on OpenShift, Red Hat’s newly announced PaaS offering.

Couchbase is a high-performance, elastic, key-value (NoSQL) database with built-in memcached caching technology. Organizations including Zynga, AOL, the BBC and thousands of others power their interactive web applications with Couchbase. Because Couchbase supports the memcached network protocol, mature and easy-to-use drivers are available for practically every programming language and application framework including PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, C# and many others.

Couchbase’s distributed database architecture is a natural fit for applications developed and deployed on the OpenShift platform. Cloud-deployed applications, particularly interactive web applications, require a data layer that is elastic, fault-tolerant and continuously available. Couchbase’s no-downtime, production-proven database technology is currently in use behind thousands of systems running in leading IaaS and PaaS environments.

“With the OpenShift platform, Red Hat has created a uniquely attractive PaaS offering that pairs open source choice with a simple, unified framework. CouchDB and memcached are two of the most prevalent open source technologies on the web, and Couchbase is excited to offer them in Couchbase OpenShift cartridges, joining other best-of-breed open source technologies.” – James Phillips, Co-founder, Couchbase

“Red Hat is pleased to welcome Couchbase to our OpenShift ecosystem,” said Sarangan Rangachari, senior director, Cloud Ecosystem at Red Hat.  “With the addition of Couchbase technology to OpenShift, we’re able to offer added choice for OpenShift users from day one.”

Additional Online Resources

• More information on OpenShift
• Download Couchbase
• Couchbase product family overview
• Read Couchbase blog
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter

Mountain View, Calif. – April 20, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced it has been recognized as a “Cool Vendor” in the April 2011 “ Cool Vendors in Infrastructure Management, 2011” report by Donald Feinberg and Eric Knipp of Gartner, Inc.

Couchbase products represent the most comprehensive family of NoSQL database solutions for building scalable web and mobile applications. Built on Apache CouchDB, Membase, and Memcached open source software, Couchbase products are used in production by hundreds of companies including AOL, ShareThis and Zynga. In addition, CouchDB, created by Couchbase CTO Damien Katz, is deployed across 10 million desktops worldwide, including at organizations such as Apple, the BBC, Canonical and Mozilla.

“We’re honored to be recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in the 2011 Infrastructure Management space,” said Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase. “The rise of NoSQL database technology reflects the dramatic shift in how applications are architected for today’s interactive web and mobile applications. As the only end-to-end NoSQL solution provider with technology that scales from big data center clusters down to smartphones, Couchbase is well positioned to be the leader in this emerging and important market.”

Additional Online Resources

• Download the “Why NoSQL?” whitepaper
• Couchbase product family overview
• Read the Couchbase blog
• Follow @couchbase on Twitter

About Gartner’s Cool Vendor Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

Mountain View, Calif. – April 19, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that Sweden-based AdAction, makers of a powerful platform for web-based advertising campaigns, has accelerated its data processing speed by 10x  using Membase Server. The migration from Apache Cassandra enabled AdAction to consistently exceed customer service-level agreements (SLAs) for performance and uptime, while at the same time reducing administrative overhead, particularly as their volume of business grows.

News Highlights

• Since 2002 AdAction has optimized the internet marketing for companies such as American Express, Scandinavian Airlines, Volkswagen, Universal Pictures and Travelocity, among others, in Europe’s Nordic region. AdAction’s core product provides ad serving solutions for its customers. The company stores massive amounts of consumer data (from 75 million consumers each month) that needs to be accessed and analyzed, and ultimately serve up highly targeted online ads—all in real time. Moreover, AdAction’s business model is “pay for performance” – the company earns revenue when their customers’ ads convert to sales. To maximize revenues, AdAction must present consumers with highly targeted ads every time.
• AdAction tried several NoSQL data management systems to store and retrieve the profile data use by its ad serving system. The most recent contender was Cassandra, which AdAction deployed with hopes of not only supporting their latency goals, but also enabling automatic expansion of cluster as user and data volumes increased. Initial implementations, however, proved to be sluggish in performance, cumbersome to rebalance and required significant downtime for upkeep and expansion.
• Looking for a better alternative, AdAction found Membase Server, which met all the requirements of their ad serving system:
  • Simple: AdAction was able to migrate to Membase Server quickly and easily in phases over just two weeks.
  • Fast: Designed for extreme low latency, Membase Server retrieves user profile data 10 times faster than Cassandra, giving AdAction substantially more headroom to process the profile data and serve up a highly targeted ad in the time allotted.
  • Elastic: Every new client that AdAction signs on brings thousands of new users and an upsurge in data volume—sometimes by as much as 10% overnight. But with Membase Server, the AdAction team can now add new cluster nodes with just a few clicks and have them up and running instantly, with no downtime, no impact on performance, and no administrative hassle.

Supporting Quotes

“We needed a system that is simple to use and manage, provides low latency and high throughput, and expands to support our business at any scale. Our future success is tied to our ability to deploy new nodes seamlessly, on demand, with no downtime or time-consuming manual re-balancing. The new infrastructure enables us to deliver on our promise – highly targeted ads served within 100 milliseconds 99.99% of the time. As a result, we are delivering a consistently excellent service for our clients and their end customers.”
– Wouter de Bie, systems developer for AdAction

“When it comes to serving ads, time is money, so AdAction requires the highest availability and lowest latency to meet our obligations. Membase Server provides fast and reliable performance for our millions of users. We no longer have to worry about working odd hours to restart cluster nodes and we can easily scale operations when traffic increases dramatically overnight.”
– Johan Stille, system developer, AdAction

“For many websites, the ability to monetize web traffic through ad and offer targeting is critical. Membase Server is gaining a lot of momentum with online advertisers for our ability to reliably retrieve operational data in substantially less time than other NoSQL alternatives, giving companies like AdAction much more processing time to accurately and effectively target ads that drive results – both for them, and their customers.”
– Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase

Mountain View, Calif. – April 4, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced it has released Membase Server for Mac OS X. Part of the Couchbase family of NoSQL database products, Membase Server, designed and optimized for the data management needs of interactive web applications, now provides a developer-friendly interface to better serve Mac-centric, web-focused developers.

News Highlights

• Membase Server for Mac OS X, a community edition released today, provides developer-friendly features that integrate seamlessly and take full advantage of the operating system, making it even easier for Mac users to develop scalable web applications against Membase Server.
   
• Applications built with Membase Server for Mac OS X can be seamlessly deployed on the production platform of choice; Membase Server currently supports Windows as well as Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux.
   
• Membase open source technology provides a distributed key-value database with integrated memcached caching technology, enabling 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 such as Zynga and ShareThis use Membase to dramatically lower data management costs while improving the scalability and performance of their demanding interactive web applications.

Supporting Quotes

“Membase Server for Mac OS X is easy as one-two-free. You download it. You run it. There’s no installation and it behaves exactly the way a Mac developer would expect.”
– Dustin Sallings, Couchbase chief architect and the primary guy behind the Mac OS X release

“Couchbase continues to invest in making things easier for developers to build scalable, high-throughput web applications. Together with today’s release of Membase Server for Mac OS X, we have also refreshed Couchbase Server for Mac OS X (our distribution of Apache CouchDB), providing the same level of OS integration and user-friendly look and feel. We look forward to continuing to provide the community with products that work the way developers do.”
– Frank Weigel, Couchbase director of product management

“We’ve been compiling source to run Membase on Mac OS X, but compiling is less-than-convenient and in the end the software didn’t look and feel like a native Mac application. It’s awesome to have a packaged Membase binary that does all that right out of the box, saving us time and making Membase Server an even better NoSQL database choice for developers.”
– Jon Prall, VP of Ops, Tango

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – (March 14, 2011)– Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created by the merger of CouchOne and Membase, today introduced a board of advisors stacked with industry executives, Internet pioneers and database technology luminaries that will play a significant role in shaping the company’s strategy and technical direction.

Members of Couchbase’s advisory board include:

• Frank Artale, has spent three decades building, investing in and advising software companies. Currently a general partner at Ignition Partners, Frank previously held senior executive roles at Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS Software, Consera Software (where he was founder and CEO) and Microsoft where he spent nine years in roles including GM of the Windows 2000 group.

• Josh Berkus is primarily known as one of the core team members of the open source database project PostgreSQL and has also worked with many other relational and non-relational database systems. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts and heavily involved in many open source communities, including CouchDB – primarily because of his interest in government open data.

• Roy Fielding is a pioneer of the World Wide Web, open source, and software architecture. He wrote the standards for HTTP and URI, defined a bit of HTML, and was among the first elected members of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. Roy is also a founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, incorporator and first chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, and a current member of the ASF board of directors.

• Richard Hipp is the architect and primary author of SQLite, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is believed to be the most widely deployed SQL database, embedded in software systems including Mozilla Firefox, Apple iOS and MacOS, Skype, PHP, Symbian, Solaris 10, McAfee anti-virus software, and countless others.

• Robert Johnson is director of infrastructure software engineering at Facebook, where he leads software development efforts to cost-effectively scale Facebook’s infrastructure and optimize performance for its over 500 million active users. During his time with the company, the number of users has expanded more than seventy-fold and Facebook now handles billions of page views a day.

• Alan Kasindorf runs memcached.org, having played a major role in the project since 2007. He has helped build numerous large websites with open source software. He is also advocate and contributor for MogileFS, Perlbal, Gearman, and others.

• Cadir Lee, Chief Technology Officer, Zynga, oversees the development and innovation of Zynga’s technology platform and large-scale infrastructures. Cadir played a pivotal role in Zynga’s founding sponsorship of the Membase open source project.

• Michael Lopp is a veteran Silicon Valley engineering manager and a well-known blogger and author. Michael writes at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose, which has led to the publication of two books: Managing Humans and Being Geek.

• Matt Ocko has over 25 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur, operating executive, and venture capitalist, during which he has actively helped create over $10 billion in fully realized shareholder value. His current and prior investments include Zynga, Facebook, XenSource, Fortinet and Verisign. He is currently a partner at Sevin Rosen.

• Michael Olson is CEO of Cloudera, the company delivering an enterprise-grade data management platform built on Apache Hadoop. He was formerly CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, the open source embedded database engine and has played key business roles at database vendors Oracle, Britton Lee, Illustra Information Technologies and Informix Software.

• In Sik Rhee is an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor across a broad spectrum of technology-enabled markets. In Sik co-founded two successful venture-backed companies: Opsware, acquired Hewlett Packard for US$1.6 billion in 2007; and Kiva Software Corporation, acquired by Netscape Communications in 1997 for $180 million. He is a general partner with Rembrandt Venture Partners.

• Steve Souders, leads web performance and open source initiatives for Google. He has authored two books: High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with over two million downloads. He also created Cuzillion, SpriteMe, and Browserscope.

• Chris Wensel, CTO/Founder, Concurrent, Inc. is the author of the Cascading data processing open-source project. He also co-founded Scale Unlimited, the first Hadoop and “Big Data” related professional services and training company.

Supporting Quotes

“The recent merger of CouchOne and Membase brought together not just a dream team of engineers, but also a veritable ‘who’s who’ of industry leaders on our Couchbase advisory board. We are honored to have these distinguished individuals on our extended team, helping us accelerate our ability to deliver on the power and promise of NoSQL database solutions. Ultimately, our customers and users will benefit from the concentration of data management expertise and industry experience we gain through our Couchbase advisors.”
– Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO

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