Enjoy Memcapable Memcached
The Schooner Appliance for Memcached/NoSQL seamlessly integrates the memcached protocol with the Schooner Operating Environment and hardware platform to provide superior enterprise caching capabilities and features. The Schooner Appliance for Memcached/NoSQL is memcapable: 100% memcapable. That means Schooner Memcached is fully compatible with both flavors of standard memcached: ASCII and Binary Protocol. Existing applications and clients will work seamlessly with the Schooner Appliance without the imposition of any changes. So it's easy to immediately do a plug-and-play deployment and begin enjoying Schooner's memcapable memcached.
But Schooner Memcached is not only memcapable — it is more than memcapable. SASL support, which is not tested by memcapable, is available on the Schooner Appliance. Replication & Automated Failover, Persistence, Backup & Restore, flexible containers, and centralized management are some more of the Schooner Appliance's features that go beyond memcapability.
Our philosophy is to maintain full compatibility with standard memcached. We are committed to it. We will not only continue to enable our system to provide new functionality included in the standard version of memcached, we will also develop our own additional enhancements in such a way so it maintains consistency with the standard protocol.
For example, one of our "beyond memcapable" features is Schooner Group Delete, which enables a group of objects with the same key — prefix to be deleted using a single command. Our customers love this feature. It helps simplify their applications as now there's no need to maintain a list of keys with a certain prefix, or iterate to find the list of such keys, to be able to delete all of them. And what's really neat is that it's implemented in-band, within the existing memcached protocol, so our customers don't have to make any changes to their memcached clients.
Schooner strongly believes in memcapable as a project, since it is critical for customers to maintain compatibility across different implementations. Not only are we fans, but we actively contribute to expanding memcapable to encompass a broader set of tests to ensure ongoing compatibility as the memcached protocol evolves.
A note on Binary Protocol — since memcapable is, after all, a tool used to verify whether a particular system supports it. Binary Protocol provides a more efficient and extensible alternative to the ASCII protocol that preceded it. While the Schooner Appliance is so efficient that using Binary Protocol doesn't really have a significant impact on its performance, it is beneficial on the client end. This is especially true for our customers who have large memcached deployments where the benefits are magnified across a large number of clients and applications. Since the new Binary Protocol is a superset of the ASCII protocol, we recommend its use for any new deployments. (We can't help but laugh at folks who talk about their systems being memcapable without supporting Binary Protocol. Memcapable is a tool used to verify whether a certain system supports the Binary Protocol, so claiming memcapability for a system that does not support it is rather funny).
Whether you have deployed memcached with ASCII, Binary Protocol, or both, or if you're looking to add a new memcached tier, using the Schooner Appliance is easy, effective, and effortless. Get yourself Schooner's Memcapable — and more than memcapable — Memcached/NoSQL Appliance and you can begin enjoying its benefits right away.