Archives: Press Releases

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