• Overview
  • General
    • ACID and BASE: MySQL and NoSQL
    • Offloading Your Database
    • Greening Your Datacenter
    • Don't Let the Cloud Rain on Your Parade

Offloading Your Database

Many software applications — especially high-performance web sites — mix different kinds of data that are best managed by different database or data store technologies. Sometimes you need the full power of a relational database management system, such as the widely-used MySQL with InnoDB. Sometimes you don't. Maybe you don't need the functionality of a full relational database. Or maybe you just can't afford the performance overhead associated with its data integrity features. The memcached protocol has become very popular as a low-overhead, high-speed way to store and retrieve unstructured data. Memcached is widely used to complement MySQL, often serving as its front end, though memcached can be used to cache data from any data source.

Schooner has software solutions — available on all properly-configured x86 servers from HP, Dell, and IBM — optimized for these distinct use cases. Membrain™ — the smart memcached, optimized for flash memory — provides both pure memcached caching and a persistent data store with the best performance, easiest scalability, and lowest downtime available. You can mix instances of pure cache and NoSQL data store on a single Membrain-powered server using our container mechanism. SchoonerSQL™ provides a full ACID-compliant transactional database.

Membrain is the best way to offload your MySQL database when you need the highest application performance. For example, customers use Membrain as their persistent data store for cookies, address books, session state, and many other classes of data. For such data sets Membrain provides much higher performance than a SQL database without losing anything in terms of enterprise-class availability, disaster recovery, and easy administration. This enterprise-class availability and reliability also lets customers use Membrain as their sole data store for many applications.

Used as a cache or as a NoSQL data store, Membrain delivers:

• Industry-leading memcached and NoSQL performance with hundreds of thousands of accesses per second per node;
• Persistence and high capacity via flash memory;
• Support for 3 or more TB of data on each commodity x86 server, depending on available slots for SSDs and SSD capacity;
• Isolation and policy control for different data sets via configurable containers;
• High availability via transparent replication and failover;
• Easy scalability via consistent, distributed hashing;
• Disaster Recovery via concurrent backup and restore; and
• Easy administration via extensive configuration, monitoring and control facilities.

You get all of this using the simple, standard, familiar memcached protocol. Membrain is 100% memcapable with both ASCII and Binary Protocol.

As a pure cache or a persistent NoSQL data store, Membrain is your best solution for offloading your database to improve overall application performance.