Schooner Information Technology, Inc. provided

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

appliances for Web 2.0,

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

and

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

s. It was headquartered in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

, and acquired by SanDisk in 2012.

History

Schooner Information Technology was founded by John R. Busch and Thomas M. McWilliams in February 2007. An investment of about $7 million in November 2007 included CMEA Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The investment was increased to $15 million by November 2008. Schooner appliances were designed to reduce total cost of ownership and be compatible with

Memcached Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of t ...

and

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

. The Schooner appliances were marketed for Web 2.0, cloud computing and enterprise data centers. After the

financial crisis of 2007–08 Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

, Schooner was one of only a few to receive venture investment. On April 13, 2009, Schooner announced IBM would resell its appliance for MySQL Enterprise and one for Memcached. Another round of $20 million investment was announced in July 2009, led by

Menlo Ventures Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California with an additional office in San Francisco, California. The firm was founded as one of the earliest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley in 1976 and provides technology ...

. Schooner's appliances were originally built on the IBM System x server with Nehalem dual four-core processors from

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...

, 64 GB of

dynamic random access memory Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...

, 512 GB of Intel X25-E

solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...

s, four

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...

ports and in a 2

rack unit A rack unit (abbreviated U or RU) is a unit of measure defined as . It is most frequently used as a measurement of the overall height of 19-inch and 23-inch rack frames, as well as the height of equipment that mounts in these frames, whereby th ...

appliance, with the ability to expand. By early 2011, the tie to IBM hardware ended. Instead, the product was sold as software that could run on other brands of computers. In April 2011, Schooner announced support for using cluster computing with the InnoDB technology. SanDisk acquired the company with undisclosed terms in June 2012 and it operated as a subsidiary of SanDisk. The Memcached software was marketed with the name Membrain through about mid-2014.

References

{{Western Digital Software companies established in 2007 Companies based in Menlo Park, California SanDisk 2007 establishments in California Software companies disestablished in 2012 2012 disestablishments in California 2012 mergers and acquisitions