Schooner Information Technology Releases Next-Generation Turnkey Data-Access Appliances for MySQL and Memcached/NoSQL

Schooner Expands the Market for MySQL, Brings Flash Memory to NoSQL and Adds Industry-Leading High-Availability/Disaster-Recovery Support in Latest Releases

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 13, 2010 — Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a provider of scalable turnkey data-access appliances, today announced the immediate general availability of Release 2.0 of the Schooner Appliance for MySQL Enterprise™ with InnoDB and the Schooner Appliance for Memcached/NoSQL. These new releases factor in feedback from customer usage of Release 1.0, and:

• Add an extensive suite of high-availability/disaster-recovery (HA/DR) capabilities, enabling customers to achieve dramatic server consolidation with very low risk;
• Extend the Schooner performance advantage through continued holistic optimization of the MySQL and Memcached software, flash memory, DRAM and multi-core Intel processors;
• Provide a powerful flash-based NoSQL key-value store based on the Memcached API;
• Extend the Memcached implementation to be 100 percent memcapable, including Binary Protocol; and,
• Extend the administrative tools, including a command-line interface compatible with the widely-used Cisco IOS interface, for easy configuration and management.

"Today's datacenters require a much higher level of performance than commodity solutions can provide," said Jerry Rudisin, chief executive officer, Schooner. "With the innovation we're delivering, datacenters can achieve a quantum leap in server consolidation while ensuring that availability is not compromised. The reduction in cost and risk due to this kind of implementation is compelling."

Delivering Superb Performance, Extreme Availability and Dramatic Server Consolidation

The latest Schooner Appliances outperform any other MySQL, caching and key-value store solutions on the market. Schooner customers enjoy server consolidation of more than eight to one; a greater than 90 percent reduction in downtime; and a five- to eight-times speedup of typical MySQL queries. The default storage capacity of the Schooner Appliances is 512 GB of fast flash memory, enabling new classes of applications to store and access their data in an optimized storage hierarchy of flash memory, DRAM and hard drives. Schooner's approach markedly boosts performance, reduces power consumption, and improves availability compared to other approaches based on flash drives or even pure DRAM.

Sun Microsystems / MySQL, now part of Oracle Corporation, has officially certified the Schooner MySQL Appliance as a completely compatible solution that delivers full ACID-compliant (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) MySQL with InnoDB.

The Schooner Appliance for Memcached/NoSQL supports both 100-percent memcapable Memcached and a persistent key-value store with enterprise-grade HA/DR features. Customers use this appliance both for super-fast high-capacity caching and for a scalable NoSQL data store without the overhead of ACID compliance and full SQL queries. Schooner's unique container mechanism allows multiple caches and key-value stores, each with its own replication and recovery properties, to share the same appliance.

Schooner Delivers for the Enterprise, Worldwide

The clear value of the Schooner Appliances has led to rapid customer adoption. Reactions include:

• Darryl Weatherspoon, vice president of engineering at Xoom.com, which allows people to send money from any Internet-enabled computer to family, friends and business in 47 countries, said "Our ad hoc MySQL queries run at least five times faster after installing the Schooner Appliances, which deliver a huge performance benefit and are a breeze to install and manage."
• Frank Penning, chief technology officer of Holtzbrinck eLab, parent company of leading German Web community GuteFrage, said "In our business, the performance and efficiency that is the key to the success of our Web properties is driven heavily by MySQL and cache performance. The Schooner Appliances have helped GuteFrage significantly improve the overall web site response time while at the same time allowing us to reduce our hardware footprint by consolidating multiple database slaves onto a single Schooner Appliance. This also dramatically reduces the effort of database administration."

"Our customers feel the need for speed, extreme reliability and terabyte-scale capacity. Schooner's unique approach to co-optimizing the use of multi-core processors, flash memory, DRAM, and the application software, and delivering in a turnkey solution, makes it much easier and cheaper for datacenters to scale out," said Rudisin. "The vast increase in MySQL capacity and speed that we deliver in the Schooner MySQL Appliance suddenly makes MySQL the right choice for much larger and more demanding applications, expanding the MySQL market."

Rudisin continued, "Some of the great interest in NoSQL comes from perceived limits in MySQL, and we blow past those limits. But there are cases where the full data-integrity and query capabilities of a SQL database aren't required because you're solving a different problem. Schooner's powerful Memcached-based key-value store delivers a high-performance enterprise-grade NoSQL solution, which is in production use today."

Each Schooner Appliance is built on a reliable, energy-efficient IBM System x™ Server, and comes with dual quad-core Intel® Xeon™ "Nehalem" processors, 512 GB of Schooner-optimized Intel X25-E flash memory, 64 GB of DRAM, and high-speed 1/10-Gb Ethernet interconnect technology. Customers may buy directly from Schooner in the U.S. and Canada or from IBM worldwide.

About Schooner

Schooner provides scalable turnkey data-access appliances for datacenters that need MySQL, Memcached or NoSQL with superb performance and extreme availability. One appliance delivers certified MySQL Enterprise with InnoDB for a full ACID-compliant database. The other delivers a high-performance cache and a NoSQL persistent key-value store, both based on Memcached. Each Schooner Appliance optimizes the software and its use of flash memory, multi-core processors and DRAM. Customers see dramatic server consolidation, 50 percent lower cost of ownership, 90 percent less downtime, and new business opportunities based on fast access to terabyte-scale data. Schooner is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California. Learn more at www.schoonerinfotech.com.

Media Contact

Laurie Falconer
Schwartz Communications
(415) 512-0770
Schooner@schwartz-pr.com