Home Memcached and Beyond: NorthScale Raises Bar with $10m Series B

Memcached and Beyond: NorthScale Raises Bar with $10m Series B

NorthScale is on the move. Hot off its recent accomplishment of winning several awards – including best in show at the 2010 Under the Radar event – the company announced a successful round of financing from the Mayfield Fund.

Its successful product release in March put the company on the map as a defining leader in the noSQL approach to data persistence. The company has already gained Zynga as a customer of its beta version of Memcached, and has announced its plans to provide elastic data infrastructure as an approach to scaling applications in the cloud.

Along with the new funding, industry veteran Bob Wiederhold has joined the company.

In Wiederhold’s first blog post as CEO, “Simply Transformational,” he shares the attitude for the company in a word: simplicity.

If the company can make scaling high-performance Web applications in cloud infrastructures easier, a big opportunity exists for them to scale a portion of the persistence data market.

Scaling Out: noSQL Approach

Here is the company’s presentation (along with Q&A) from the presentation at Under the Radar.

In this demonstration, the company shares the places where the noSQL works well – and its vision for moving beyond Memcached for scaling both within and beyond the walls of the data center.

Scaling: It is The Biggest Show on Earth

One of the things that is satisfying in light of NorthScale and the growth of Memcached is how the usage pattern of the Web has changed the underlying assumptions of data architecture. Since Web applications scale in the cloud, the data layer needs to scale in the same manner too to avoid being the bottleneck.

When we look to the list of Memcached users we see many of the current leaders in scaling Web architecture such as Facebook, YouTube, and Zynga using the simple yet effective approach.

On Facebook’s Open Source page, the company describes its involvement with Memcached:

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. Memcached was not originally developed at Facebook, but we have become the largest user of the technology.

NorthScale is building its business on the premise that elastic data infrastructure is a key layer in the stack. From what we see, serving the full gambit of distributed applications will be needed in order to reach the scale-out potential of cloud computing.

Will NorthScale help evolve Memcached high-scaling Web object technology to a ubiquitous data tier used by the majority of cloud applications?

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