Membase Server is Now Generally Available!

I am proud to say we have just released Membase Server 1.6 for general availability. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our hundreds of beta users, who have worked with us over the past few months providing excellent feedback and helping us drive the product forward. Thank you!

Here are some of the things that stand out to me as we release the product to market:

New Company Name
You’ve probably already noticed, but this release marks another important milestone in the life of our company: today, we announced that NorthScale, Inc. has become Membase, Inc.
Since the launch of our beta last June, it’s become really clear to us that users want simple, fast, elastic data storage – and that’s what Membase technology stands for. We want our company name to make it clear that we are the ones standing behind Membase technology, it is what we are all about.

Product Features
I wrote about this in my last blog, but good things bear repeating. Two of my favorite things about this release are:

– Unified Memcached and Membase bucket types. What is really cool is that with these bucket types, you only need a single product to support an elastic, replicated and persisted data store or a Memcached compatible caching layer – or both! For those considering a Memcached deployment, there are a number of potential benefits to deploying Membase as your Memcached solution.

– Linux and Windows support: we’ve found that there is tremendous demand for Membase across the spectrum of operating systems. This release supports Linux and Windows in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Our support for Windows seems to really fill a gap in the market, and we’re happy to see so many Windows users taking advantage of it.

Community and Enterprise
At the core of the product is the open-source code base for Membase. This is where the development is taking place and project contributors are constantly working to extend and drive the technology forward. You can build Membase from source, or use already compiled binaries from the membase-server-community packages for Windows and Linux.

For those users who are planning on using Membase in production and who are not comfortable only relying solely on the community support model, we offer an Enterprise version of Membase. We create Enterprise releases from the open-source code base, but it goes through a more complex QA cycle and so those Enterprise binaries are the ones for which we offer commercial support. Rather than having a time-limited trial version for folks who are not yet ready to purchase a subscription, we decided to make the Enterprise binaries available for general download as well. You can use Enterprise binaries for evaluation on an unlimited number of nodes and we even allow you to run it in production on up to two nodes! The Enterprise Edition download is available here.

Now that Membase Server is generally available, we’re offering annual subscriptions for Membase Server Enterprise Edition, with various support levels. We’re also launching the Membase Network which delivers product updates, hot fixes, and product support to subscribers and makes it easier to manage entitlements and submit and track cases.

Membase.org
You may also want to check out membase.org, which has been updated and revamped to better support the community. In particular, a new wiki has been deployed, so you’ll find better technical documentation and information, with much better navigation than the previous wiki. Take a look around the wiki and browse, the navigation table on the left should help you find what you are looking for easily.

A couple of articles worth noting: Using Membase in the Cloud and Developing Your Own Smart Client. If you want to get involved in the Membase Open Source project, the wiki also provides information to get you started.

As you can see it has been a very busy time for us. Best of all, we are not slowing down – the next cool features are already in the works. But that will be the topic of another blog post :)

Stay tuned and enjoy Membase Server 1.6.0. Tell us what you think, and as always, tell us what we can do better.