Gear6 Web cache - the hardware solution for working with Memcache

The Gear6 Web Cache hybrid DRAM-flash memory architecture allows for 5-10 times more memcache memory per unit of rack space than DRAM-only configurations, and cuts memory costs by 50%. Other software enhancements include a slab allocator that is more efficient than traditional memcache implementations due to its fine-grained bucket sizing. Gear6 Web Cache also supports object sizes greater than 1 megabyte and manages evictions based on the cost of replacing objects, depending on the size and frequency of object access. It intelligently places cache instances across DRAM and flash, taking into account their different characteristics, while at the same time monitoring their health and detecting and de‐allocating faulty or failing memory.

Gear6 Web Cache is a Memcached protocol compliant solution that scales and accelerates web applications, reduces memory footprint, enhances availability and implements comprehensive Memcached management features. Designed to work with all popular memcache clients, Gear6 Web Cache integrates seamlessly into existing deployments and immediately provides a scalable, high density caching solution for your web application environment.

Some of the web services which are using Gear6 are Answers.com (wiki answers), Veoh.com (online video), myYearBook.com (social network).

Read more about Gear6 hardware and customer cases studies on Gear6 website

Facebook's Aditya giving presentation on Facebook Architecture

Facebook's engg. director aditya talks about facebook architecture. How they use mysql, php and memcache. How they have modified the above to suit their requirements.

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Alternative Memcache Usage: A Highly Scalable, Highly Available, In-Memory Shard Index

While working with Memcache the other night, it dawned on me that it’s usage as a distributed caching mechanism was really just one of many ways to use it. That there are in fact many alternative usages that one could find for Memcache if they could just realize what Memcache really is at its core – a simple distributed hash-table – is an important point worthy of further discussion. To be clear, when I say “simple”, by no means am I implying that Memcache’s implementation is simple, just that the ideas behind it are such. Think about that for a minute. What else could we use a simple distributed hash-table for, besides caching? How about using it as an alternative to the traditional shard lookup method we used in our Master Index Lookup scalability strategy, discussed previously here.

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