Schooner Updates Membrain to Version 4.0
Software cache, data store provides massive server consolidation, minimal downtime in data centers.
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Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a developer of high-availability (HA) high-performance SQL database software for mission-critical applications, has released its 4.0 release of Membrain, a memcached-compatible software cache and persistent NoSQL key-value store that delivers 10x server consolidation to greatly simplify data center scale out for capacity and performance.
Membrain runs on standard x86 servers from Dell, HP, and IBM. It is optimized to exploit flash memory and now supports up to one terabyte (TB) per server to accommodate new high-capacity flash drives from Fusion-io, Intel, LSI Corporation, and other manufacturers.
To scale a software cache or NoSQL data store, enterprises traditionally kept the dataset on each server small enough to fit in the available dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to achieve good performance. This leads to excessive sharding and poor server utilization as more servers are added for more capacity, which, in turn, causes serious scaling problems and excessive spending on new hardware and on the power and people to run them.
Membrain addresses these data center challenges, offering a multi-threaded implementation of memcached and leveraging flash to increase server performance, up-time and storage capacity while cutting total cost of ownership (TCO) by more than half.
With Membrain 4.0, Schooner delivers several new features:
- Increase from 512 GB to 1 TB (1024 GB) in the amount of flash memory supported on each x86 server
- Full-featured graphical user interface (GUI) for easier management and monitoring of the Membrain instances
- Support for monitoring instances of stock memcached that are often used in conjunction with flash-optimized Membrain
- Upgraded installer
- Upgraded remote diagnostics tool
- Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 and CentOS 6.2
Membrain 4.0 starts with a Schooner implementation of memcached optimized for maximum concurrency and is extended to support the persistence, synchronous replication, guaranteed consistency, and backup needed for an enterprise-grade data store. This optimized data-access layer is coupled with a Schooner library that tightly integrates and balances the use of all system resources -- multiple cores, flash memory, and DRAM -- to maximize performance and availability as well as minimize cost.
More information is available at www.schoonerinfotech.com/.