The massive growth of the internet has given birth to what is sometimes referred to as "web scale" computing. Large enterprises and companies like Google, Yahoo!, MS, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, etc are running data centers that house thousands of servers, sometimes in the 100′s of thousands of servers.
From database servers for user/transaction data, network storage for images and documents, or sprawled replication to crunch through massive amounts of log data for analytics purposes they are continuously adding new gear and replacing older worn out equipment at a feverish pace.
As web scale computing grew there was big adoption away from the old mainframe and grid computing days to people snapping up tons of commodity gear and focusing on horizontal scaling, "throw more hardware at it" is a common term you would here engineering and/or IT teams throw out there.
Every so often you get new cycles of funding happening around similar types of technology solutions and a group of companies will come to market with complimentary or competitive solutions to each other. It seems we are in one of those periods around specialized hardware/software solutions that have the common thread of getting rid of large percentages of that commodity gear IT staffs have been purchasing over the past couple of years.
A new crop of early stage companies have been popping up over the past year that are targeting widely used open source technologies that are key components in serving massive web apps.
Gear6: Memcached is probably the most widely used open source in memory cache solution used by web apps today. Developed originally for use at LiveJournal the caching system is a must for any web developers, particularly those in the LAMP stack space. Gear6′s Web Cache offering is a hardware/software solution delivered in a rack appliance that turns solid state hard drives (SSD) into massive memcached storage pools.
Due to the compact size of SSD’s and high speed read/write times they provide Gear6 is able to pack them into the little server and shrink the number of memcached servers an IT staff would use. For companies running large numbers of memcached servers (Facebook runs ~1k+) they are able to reduce the number of servers by around a factor of ~8x.
Besides high performance, high density benefits Gear6 also focuses heavily on the reporting and management software that their solution provides. As the SSD industry continues to progress things with better reliability and cheaper prices expect to see Gear6 split our their software solution and ship it as a download only that allows for IT staffs to build out their own servers and run Gear6 tools to manage/report on everything.
Schooner: In a similar manner to what Gear6 provides Schooner has been recieving accolades for this custom hardware/software solutions to scale and manage MySQL and Memcached server farms. Besides the MySQL functionality where Schooner seems to differ most from Gear6 is in their sales/support strategy.
They have some very bright engineers from Sun/IBM that worked away developing custom firmware to run on top of IBM servers packed with high performance Intel SSD drives. Their servers are private labeled IBM services which includes an IBM support contract when an enterprise runs the gear.
The support model should allow the company to continue to scale at a rapid clip which is not hurt by the fact that they just raised a $20 million series b venture round.
MaxiScale: There currently is not too much to say about MaxiScale as they are still deep in stealth mode with a sparse website as they work their way through their first phase of beta customers. MaxiScale is focusing on a custom storage solution that comes in a 1-U rack mount server.
Their customer firmware and software allows small static files to be read and accessed with extremely low overhead. As they are still very stealth one can on speculate but these folks seem to be definitely gunning for the likes of NetApp. With the small footprint and efficient access its a great solution to free up some datacenter space and developed custom storage solutions on top of.
We will be keeping an eye on these three and others that most likely will be entering the space over the next couple quaters.
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