There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series

“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.

So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat country and the …

Some recent news of interest:

Wikipedia is one of the world's most visited web sites (8th in the top 10, in fact), delivering an enormous breadth of content to an audience as vast as the internet.

But Wikipedia's evolved to become more than an on-line encyclopedia: they've become one of the world's largest search engines, they're a global source of real-time news, alongisde educational, political and health related content - and one of the world's most valuable brands and media properties.

Wikipedia's also a great example of a "redshift" application: a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate. Technology companies have to pay special attention to such …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Karim Lakhani has put together a business case study on Wikipedia. It is worth noting that Wikipedia uses MySQL as its database engine. 

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …