Schooner appliance?

Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?

- Steve Webb

--
Steve Webb - Lead System Administrator for Pronto.com
Email: swebb@pronto.com (Please send any work requests to: [email protected])
Cell: 303-564-4269, Office: 303-351-1312, YIM: scumola

It's not a Schooner, it's a sailboat!

(Sorry, I just had to)

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Steve Webb <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?
>
> - Steve Webb
>
> --
> Steve Webb - Lead System Administrator for Pronto.com
> Email: swebb@pronto.com (Please send any work requests to: [email protected])
> Cell: 303-564-4269, Office: 303-351-1312, YIM: scumola
>

A schooner is a sailboat!

Having said that, no, I don't. I met with them a while back and it
definitely seemed like some really cool technology, but not really
what we were looking for at the time.

For anybody who is interested, they build some flash memory-based
products like this:

http://www1.schoonerinfotech.com/products/memcached-appliance.html

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Michael Shadle <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> It's not a Schooner, it's a sailboat!
>
> (Sorry, I just had to)
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Steve Webb <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?
>>
>> - Steve Webb
>>
>> --
>> Steve Webb - Lead System Administrator for Pronto.com
>> Email: swebb@pronto.com (Please send any work requests to: [email protected])
>> Cell: 303-564-4269, Office: 303-351-1312, YIM: scumola
>>
>



--
awl

Yes we are looking into the device, but it is not cheap. I am hoping
that when the storage engine branch is released, that we can hook up
some SSD to a standard memcached box and see how they compare.
Schooner has a few more features, but truly they are a specialized
version of Memcached with custom hardware.



On Sep 22, 9:55 am, Adam Lee <a...@fotolog.biz> wrote:
> A schooner is a sailboat!
>
> Having said that, no, I don't.  I met with them a while back and it
> definitely seemed like some really cool technology, but not really
> what we were looking for at the time.
>
> For anybody who is interested, they build some flash memory-based
> products like this:
>
> http://www1.schoonerinfotech.com/products/memcached-appliance.html
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Michael Shadle <mike...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It's not a Schooner, it's a sailboat!
>
> > (Sorry, I just had to)
>
> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Steve Webb <sw...@pronto.com> wrote:
>
> >> Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?
>
> >> - Steve Webb
>
> >> --
> >> Steve Webb - Lead System Administrator for Pronto.com
> >> Email: sw...@pronto.com (Please send any work requests to: r...@pronto..com)
> >> Cell: 303-564-4269, Office: 303-351-1312, YIM: scumola
>
> --
> awl

In general, I'm aware of three companies making products in this space:
Gear6
Virident
Schooner

They all share some common features such as:
- combination of RAM and flash (SSD)
- sold in memcached and mySQL versions
- linux based
- marketed as a way of reducing your space and power utiization (since
you can used the SSD as storage, you can get a lot more "space" into a
1U or 2U box than you could with just RAM.

I know that some have expressed strong feelings on the list and IRC
about particular vendors, but I'd personally like to hear if anyone
is using these products and some of the "unique" features they tout
such as replication, persistence, etc. The topic comes up enough that
I think a vendor-agnostic discussion would be worthwhile. We could
always take it to private email if that's considered off-topic for the
list.

Dan

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:36 AM, RogueWarrior <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Yes we are looking into the device, but it is not cheap.  I am hoping
> that when the storage engine branch is released, that we can hook up
> some SSD to a standard memcached box and see how they compare.
> Schooner has a few more features, but truly they are a specialized
> version of Memcached with custom hardware.
>
>
>
> On Sep 22, 9:55 am, Adam Lee <a...@fotolog.biz> wrote:
>> A schooner is a sailboat!
>>
>> Having said that, no, I don't.  I met with them a while back and it
>> definitely seemed like some really cool technology, but not really
>> what we were looking for at the time.
>>
>> For anybody who is interested, they build some flash memory-based
>> products like this:
>>
>> http://www1.schoonerinfotech.com/products/memcached-appliance.html
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Michael Shadle <mike...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > It's not a Schooner, it's a sailboat!
>>
>> > (Sorry, I just had to)
>>
>> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Steve Webb <sw...@pronto.com> wrote:
>>
>> >> Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?
>>
>> >> - Steve Webb
>>
>> >> --
>> >> Steve Webb - Lead System Administrator for Pronto.com
>> >> Email: sw...@pronto.com (Please send any work requests to: r...@pronto.com)
>> >> Cell: 303-564-4269, Office: 303-351-1312, YIM: scumola
>>
>> --
>> awl

This is somewhat off topic, since these are all private forks of
memcached. Asking for public opinion on a public open source list about a
vendor product isn't likely to yield great results for you anyway. I'm
sure you can contact folks off-list.

-Dormando

On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Dan Simoes wrote:

>
> In general, I'm aware of three companies making products in this space:
> Gear6
> Virident
> Schooner
>
> They all share some common features such as:
> - combination of RAM and flash (SSD)
> - sold in memcached and mySQL versions
> - linux based
> - marketed as a way of reducing your space and power utiization (since
> you can used the SSD as storage, you can get a lot more "space" into a
> 1U or 2U box than you could with just RAM.
>
> I know that some have expressed strong feelings on the list and IRC
> about particular vendors, but I'd personally like to hear if anyone
> is using these products and some of the "unique" features they tout
> such as replication, persistence, etc. The topic comes up enough that
> I think a vendor-agnostic discussion would be worthwhile. We could
> always take it to private email if that's considered off-topic for the
> list.
>
> Dan
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:36 AM, RogueWarrior <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Yes we are looking into the device, but it is not cheap.  I am hoping
> > that when the storage engine branch is released, that we can hook up
> > some SSD to a standard memcached box and see how they compare.
> > Schooner has a few more features, but truly they are a specialized
> > version of Memcached with custom hardware.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sep 22, 9:55 am, Adam Lee <a...@fotolog.biz> wrote:
> >> A schooner is a sailboat!
> >>
> >> Having said that, no, I don't.  I met with them a while back and it
> >> definitely seemed like some really cool technology, but not really
> >> what we were looking for at the time.
> >>
> >> For anybody who is interested, they build some flash memory-based
> >> products like this:
> >>
> >> http://www1.schoonerinfotech.com/products/memcached-appliance.html
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Michael Shadle <mike...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > It's not a Schooner, it's a sailboat!
> >>
> >> > (Sorry, I just had to)
> >>
> >> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Steve Webb <sw...@pronto.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> >> Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?
> >>
> >> >> - Steve Webb
> >>
> >> >> --
> >> >> Steve Webb - Lead System Administrator for Pronto.com
> >> >> Email: sw...@pronto.com (Please send any work requests to: r...@pronto.com)
> >> >> Cell: 303-564-4269, Office: 303-351-1312, YIM: scumola
> >>
> >> --
> >> awl
>

On Sep 22, 11:54 am, Dan Simoes <dan.sim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In general, I'm aware of three companies making products in this space:
> Gear6
> Virident
> Schooner
>
> They all share some common features such as:
> - combination of RAM and flash (SSD)
> - sold in memcached and mySQL versions
> - linux based
> - marketed as a way of reducing your space and power utiization (since
> you can used the SSD as storage, you can get a lot more "space" into a
> 1U or 2U box than you could with just RAM.
>
> I know that some have expressed strong feelings on the list and IRC
> about particular vendors,  but I'd personally like to hear if anyone
> is using these products and some of the "unique" features they tout
> such as replication, persistence, etc.  The topic comes up enough that
> I think a vendor-agnostic discussion would be worthwhile.  We could
> always take it to private email if that's considered off-topic for the
> list.
>
> Dan
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:36 AM, RogueWarrior <rac...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes we are looking into the device, but it is not cheap.  I am hoping
> > that when the storage engine branch is released, that we can hook up
> > some SSD to a standard memcached box and see how they compare.
> > Schooner has a few more features, but truly they are a specialized
> > version of Memcached with custom hardware.
>
> > On Sep 22, 9:55 am, Adam Lee <a...@fotolog.biz> wrote:
> >> A schooner is a sailboat!
>
> >> Having said that, no, I don't.  I met with them a while back and it
> >> definitely seemed like some really cool technology, but not really
> >> what we were looking for at the time.
>
> >> For anybody who is interested, they build some flash memory-based
> >> products like this:
>
> >>http://www1.schoonerinfotech.com/products/memcached-appliance.html
>
> >> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Michael Shadle <mike...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> > It's not a Schooner, it's a sailboat!
>
> >> > (Sorry, I just had to)
>
> >> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Steve Webb <sw...@pronto.com> wrote:
>
> >> >> Q: Does anyone have any experience with the Schooner memcached appliance?
>
> >> >> - Steve Webb
>


We use memcached a lot for our hosting customers. It's a mix of stock
memcached stuff,
with the usual kinds of hardware, and a few Gear6 setups.

We've found that the memcached gem for rails has some issues when
memcached nodes drop offline,
and are also limited to <1MB objects. Since some of our customers want
to use memcached for larger
objects (images mostly) that limitation was a bit of a problem. This
doesn't reflect on memcached per se
of course. But we found it expedient to go to a vendor, rather than
work on the problem ourselves.

We don't currently have any SSD equipped memcached boxes other than
the Gear6 ones. I don't expect
there would be any significant issues with them if we did. We've had
no storage issues with the SSD equipped
Gear6 ones.

On Sep 28, 2:10 pm, weaselkeeper <weaselkee...@gmail.com> wrote:

> We've found that the memcached gem for rails has some issues when
> memcached nodes drop offline,

How has a different server helped here. Have any bugs been filed in
the memcached gem you were using? I'd love to get those problems
fixed.

> and are also limited to <1MB objects. Since some of our customers want
> to use memcached for larger
> objects (images mostly) that limitation was a bit of a problem. This
> doesn't reflect on memcached per se
> of course. But we found it expedient to go to a vendor, rather than
> work on the problem ourselves.

It's a constant that's defined in a header file and is trivial to
change. It's basically there as a rule of thumb. If you want
something bigger, you're likely doing something wrong.

For example, if you're trying to cache images for a site, you should
*probably* be using squid or varnish or cloudfiles or something
similar as your caching tier which will yield you *far* greater
scalability and performance.

But if you want to use memcached for it and the 1MB barrier hits
you, it's still just a number that exists in one place. I suppose we
could even make it a configure option, though it's rare that anyone
approaches 1MB without there being a better solution to their
problems.

Dustin,


On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Dustin <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> It's a constant that's defined in a header file and is trivial to
> change. It's basically there as a rule of thumb. If you want
> something bigger, you're likely doing something wrong.
>
>
Just an FYI... this is non-trivial for anyone running in a Windows
environment. While I don't disagree that storage of large items is a point
where the developer needs to step back and review their caching, if I *had* a
reason to want larger sizes, I couldn't actually implement them because I'm
constrained by a Windows environment.

--
"If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets,
lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a
hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern."
Ursula K. Le Guin

What's different about data in the cloud? http://www.azuredba.com

http://www.finsel.com/words,-words,-words.aspx (My blog) -
http://www.finsel.com/photo-gallery.aspx (My Photogallery) -
http://www.reluctantdba.com/dbas-and-programmers/blog.aspx (My Professional
Blog)

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a
messy bloodbath.

Well, even though the windows build still isn't part of the main trunk, you
can still compile it yourself if you use this version:
http://code.jellycan.com/memcached/

And if you do that, changing that constant isn't hard. I agree it's not
trivial, but it's not hard to overcome if you really need to.


/Henrik

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 14:35, Josef Finsel <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dustin,
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Dustin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> It's a constant that's defined in a header file and is trivial to
>> change. It's basically there as a rule of thumb. If you want
>> something bigger, you're likely doing something wrong.
>>
>>
> Just an FYI... this is non-trivial for anyone running in a Windows
> environment. While I don't disagree that storage of large items is a point
> where the developer needs to step back and review their caching, if I *had
> * a reason to want larger sizes, I couldn't actually implement them
> because I'm constrained by a Windows environment.
>
> --
> "If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets,
> lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a
> hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern."
> Ursula K. Le Guin
>
> What's different about data in the cloud? http://www.azuredba.com
>
> http://www.finsel.com/words,-words,-words.aspx (My blog) -
> http://www.finsel.com/photo-gallery.aspx (My Photogallery) -
> http://www.reluctantdba.com/dbas-and-programmers/blog.aspx (My
> Professional Blog)
>
> I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a
> messy bloodbath.
>