Schooner Information Technology Data-Access Appliances Bring Social Networking Leader Plaxo Ten-to-One Server Consolidation
Largest and Fastest Growing Address Book Service Uses Schooner Memcached Appliance to Improve Performance While Reducing Development Expenses and Total Cost of Ownership
SUNNYVALE, Calif., January 25, 2010 — Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a provider of data-access appliances for Web 2.0, cloud computing and enterprise datacenters, today announced that Plaxo, a smart, socially-aware address book service with more than 40 million users, has purchased Schooner's Appliance for Memcached. This has given Plaxo much higher capacity and performance in its datacenters, while significantly reducing operating and administrative expenses.
Plaxo is an address book service that leverages the power of social networking to bring contacts to life by enabling users to stay up-to-date and in touch. Faced with the need to efficiently scale its datacenter to support its ever growing user base, Plaxo selected the Schooner Appliance for Memcached, each of which replaces ten commodity 64GB Memcached servers. The Schooner Appliances for Memcached give Plaxo much higher capacity and performance, superior reliability and substantially reduced operating costs for rack space and power.
"Plaxo is dedicated to providing a dramatically new online experience for the users of our address book service, so it is essential that access to data be quick and constant," said Ethan Erchinger, director of operations, Plaxo. "Schooner provides a real solution that improves performance and capacity while reducing rack space and power requirements. Schooner's built-in replication features mean that we're sure that what's on one node will also be on the other, so our developers save time by not having to program defensively. All of this enables us to do more with less."
The Plaxo architecture combines the Schooner appliances in clustered pairs. Replication provides failure protection, while the appliances run in synchronous mode. A caching tier running several Memcached servers typically produces misses due to the number of servers involved, but the single source provided by the Schooner appliance eliminates the misses associated with a caching tier. Plaxo has also been able to enhance application development through the integration of the Schooner Appliance for Memcached. Developers enjoy cache coherency, 100 percent access availability and reduced latency.
"Schooner's appliances combine state-of-the-art software with enterprise-grade flash memory, delivered in a proven and reliable IBM X-Server box. It's an appliance — you plug it in, configure it and it works, providing real value," said Jerry Rudisin, chief executive officer, Schooner Information Technology. "Schooner provides the most efficient and cost-effective way to scale Web 2.0 and cloud computing datacenters. We are very pleased that an innovative service provider like Plaxo recognized the value of the Schooner Appliance for Memcached and was able to see that value so easily and convincingly."
About Schooner
Schooner Information Technology provides smooth scaling for Web 2.0, cloud computing and enterprise datacenters through its balanced data-access application appliances. Schooner solutions are fast, scalable, cost-effective and green. Schooner customers enjoy eight-to-one server consolidation and save power and space, reducing total cost of ownership by 50 percent and create new business opportunities based on rapid access to terabyte-scale data. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and is venture funded by Menlo Ventures, CMEA Capital and Redpoint Ventures. For more information, please visit www.schoonerinfotech.com.