ScaleOut Software Response to the Announcement of Microsoft Distributed Caching Project Code-Named “Velocity”
Orlando, FL – June 5, 2008 – Since January 2005, ScaleOut Software has provided leadership in distributed caching for the .NET platform. We pioneered this market and now work with leading customers such as Reuters and Home Shopping Network to deploy mission-critical distributed caching solutions. Our production-proven caching products now are running on hundreds of server farms worldwide. At TechEd this week, we announced version 4.0 of ScaleOut StateServer, offering advanced new features and demonstrating our continued leadership, and our new Grid Computing Edition, due for release in July, will introduce more exciting new capabilities.
ScaleOut Software’s products reflect parallel computing expertise developed over more than twenty-five years, dating back to Intel multiprocessor and parallel supercomputer projects from the early 1980’s. Our products offer rich feature sets, a highly integrated, self-managing architecture, and comprehensive management tools. We recently demonstrated the industry’s leading distributed caching performance and scalability in performance tests run on 64 high performance compute nodes in Microsoft’s Enterprise Engineering Center.
Announced this week at the TechEd conference, Microsoft’s project code-named “Velocity” provides helpful industry validation of the need for .NET distributed caching to scale the performance of server-farm applications. However, we are disappointed that this surprise announcement has created confusion for our customers. To meet their needs, we will continue to drive innovation in our products and provide industry leadership in distributed caching and highly scalable, data-parallel computing.
ScaleOut Software’s flagship, production-proven, distributed caching product, ScaleOut StateServer (SOSS) has several key capabilities not included in the first Community Technology Preview (CTP1) release of the Microsoft project code-named “Velocity.” SOSS is compatible with all .NET releases starting with version 1.1 instead of only .NET 3.5. SOSS also includes:
- integrated high availability for stored data, which is required for mission-critical applications,
- a self-configuring, self-healing, and fully peer-to-peer architecture,
- optional, scalable, quorum-based updating of stored objects using a patented algorithm,
- asynchronous “push” notifications of cache events using a scalable, highly available delivery mechanism,
- optional asynchronous replication between remote data centers to support disaster recovery scenarios,
- parallel query of cached objects based on identifying tags,
- parallel method invocation enabling map/reduce operations on selected cached objects (Grid Computing Edition), and
- an intuitive, graphical management console.
About ScaleOut StateServer
ScaleOut StateServer provides distributed, in-memory caching for server farms and compute grids to boost application performance and offload database servers. Now in its fourth major release, ScaleOut StateServer has proven its ability to accelerate application performance every day on hundreds of production server farms across a wide range of industries including financial services, e-commerce, and many others. Its patented technology for scaling performance and replicating data enables it to deliver scalable access to cached data while maintaining high availability in case of server failures. Tests have shown that ScaleOut StateServer’s performance quickly outpaces database servers as the load on a server farm grows. By using ScaleOut StateServer’s distributed, in-memory cache for application data storage, developers can maintain fast response times while their server farm grows to handle increasing workloads.
ScaleOut StateServer runs on .NET server farms and communicates over an existing LAN. Once installed, it can be used to replace ASP.NET’s built-in session-state storage and enable ASP.NET applications to seamlessly and transparently store and retrieve session-state. The product also provides powerful APIs for caching application data in a single, uniformly accessible, distributed cache. ScaleOut StateServer implements comprehensive distributed caching semantics, including distributed locking, object timeouts, and automatic memory reclamation. In addition, it offers a unique, scalable event handling mechanism which automatically distributes the event handling load across the server farm and reliably delivers events even if a server outage occurs.
The ScaleOut GeoServer Option uses data replication to extend distributed caching across multiple, geographically distributed data centers so that they can share fast-changing workloads and be fully protected against site-wide failures. GeoServer’s capabilities help IT managers meet the stringent performance and uptime needs of high-end Web sites and other mission-critical applications.
About ScaleOut Software, Inc.
ScaleOut Software develops software products that provide scalable, highly available caching for workload data in server farms and compute grids. It has offices in Bellevue Washington and Beaverton, Oregon. The company was founded by Dr. William L. Bain, whose previous company, Valence Research, developed and distributed Web load-balancing software that was acquired by Microsoft Corporation and is now called Network Load Balancing within the Windows Server operating system.
For more information, contact David Brinker at daveb@www.scaleoutsoftware.com or visit www.scaleoutsoftware.com. ScaleOut Software, Inc. 10900 NE 8th Street, Suite 900, Bellevue, WA 98004, T: 503-643-3422.