Under the radar startup NorthScale is publicly launching today with a new data management technology to help web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data. For example, social gaming giant Zynga has been using NorthScale since December.

Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Cloudera for Hadoop or Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability.

The NorthScale Memcached Server is the also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high‐performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.

Investor Accel Partners’ Kevin Effrusy tells me NorthScale is providing an realtime, efficient and cost-effective product that could radically change the dynamic of transactional data management. Currently Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale as a foundations for shared data management infrastructure. Founded in 2009, the startup has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. NorthScale faces competition from Gear6.

Crunchbase

• COUCHBASE

Company: Couchbase

Website: couchbase.com

Launch Date: January 2, 2009

Funding: $31M

Couchbase is the name of the new NoSQL database company and product family created through the merger of CouchOne and Membase. Couchbase technologies represent the most comprehensive data management solution for building scalable web and mobile applications, with indexing, flexible querying and ease of use that developers love; and elastic clustering, robust storage management and consistently high performance relied on by system administrators and operators. Couchbase is a privately held company funded by Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, North Bridge...

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