Membase and Drupal
Barry and I just met with a team from Northscale -- the startup formed to support and extend Memcached, the popular key-value cache used by the largest web sites. We learned about their new database project, Membase, and talked about how it could help high-volume Drupal sites including our Acquia Hosting customers.
Membase is built on the core Memcached technology and supports the Memcached API. I'm excited about what they've done to extend Memcached:
- Persistence: Today, while Membase includes its forerunner's fast in-memory key-value store, it also persists data to disk. If you reboot your Membase server, your data is not lost.
- Automatic Rebalancing: When a new server to added to a Memcached cluster, performance suffers while that server builds its caches from scratch. Membase fixes this by automatically transferring cached data from the existing servers to the new one.
- Multi-tier Storage Model: Membase's cache can be spread across multiple storage tiers: in-memory, SSD, and disk. It moves the least used data to the slowest storage tiers.
- Replication: It supports both master-slave and peer-to-peer replication.
Membase looks to be a strong contender in the NoSQL key-value store arena. Zynga is using it currently as a backend for their popular FarmVille game. I look forward to seeing how it compares to MongoDB and Cassandra. Like those DBs, I think it has great potential to accelerate highly-trafficked, write-intensive Drupal sites.
The NorthScale team is eager to work with developers who want to use Membase as a backend for their Drupal modules or caches. At Acquia we're in the midst of adding standard Memcached support for customers on our Acquia Hosting platform (which is also used by Drupal Gardens). We're looking at extending this to also include Membase as well. Please comment if you have used or are considering Membase for your Drupal site.
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We've been hard at work putting together web traffic reporting for all sites on Acquia Hosting, and it's now available in the Acquia Network subscription interface. These statistics provide a level of traffic detail across our hosting stack that is not available from other sources such as Google Analytics or log file analyzers like awstats, particularly, how many requests are being served from each layer of the Drupal and LAMP stack. We're also making available the fully expanded data behind these numbers as a CSV file download ready for import into your reporting tool of choice.
Kurt GrayBarry and I just met with a team from Northscale -- the startup formed to support and extend Memcached, the popular key-value cache used by the largest web sites. We learned about their new database project, Membase, and talked about how it could help high-volume Drupal sites including our Acquia Hosting customers.
Membase is built on the core Memcached technology and supports the Memcached API. I'm excited about what they've done to extend Memcached:
Jim Salem
Drupal Commons, Acquia’s new Social Business Software distribution of Drupal, is no doubt getting everyone excited. We’re especially seeing interest in the enterprise and public sector. The community solution is important because its an open source alternative to (social business software products like) Jive and another way to accelerate adoption of Drupal in the marketplace. Drupal Commons evolved because of countless inquiries and interest from organizations who want to use Drupal to build community sites. Not surprisingly, many other Drupal distributions evolved for the same reasons.
Alex Lindahl
AcquiaBlog
2010 has been an inflection point for the Acquia partner program. We are doing more business than ever with partners, including case studies with Palantir.net, Blink Reaction, and IBM Global Services.
Bryan House
It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen.
Gábor Hojtsy
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Peter Wolanin