Schooner Information Technology

About Schooner Information Technology

Schooner Information Technology, Inc. operated as a specialized developer of flash-optimized database and data store solutions tailored for the Web 2.0, cloud computing, and enterprise data center markets. The company was founded in February 2007 by John R. Busch and Thomas M. McWilliams, two seasoned technologists with extensive backgrounds in high-performance computing. John Busch's experience included roles as a technologist for the HP 3000 minicomputer line and director of Sun Labs, while Tom McWilliams was a supercomputer designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with subsequent positions at Amdahl, Silicon Graphics, Sun, and PathScale. Their combined expertise in computer architecture and systems R&D shaped the company's direction.

The firm's business model initially revolved around selling integrated hardware appliances. These appliances, built on IBM System x servers, combined multi-core processors, significant DRAM, and enterprise-grade solid-state drives (SSDs) to deliver high performance. By 2011, Schooner shifted to a software-centric model, offering its solutions to run on commodity hardware from various vendors. This strategy targeted enterprises seeking to enhance the performance of data-intensive applications and reduce their data center footprint without being locked into proprietary hardware. The company's offerings were positioned to fill a market gap between basic open-source database deployments and more expensive high-end systems.

Schooner developed two primary products: SchoonerSQL and an appliance for Memcached, later marketed as Membrain. SchoonerSQL was a high-availability OLTP database software, 100% compatible with MySQL and its InnoDB storage engine. It was engineered to provide 99.999% availability with instant, automated failover and replication, guaranteeing no lost or stale data for mission-critical applications. A key feature was its ability to seamlessly combine DRAM and flash memory, achieving near-DRAM response times at a lower cost. The Memcached solution was a flash-optimized, multi-threaded implementation of the popular open-source distributed memory caching system designed to accelerate dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. The company secured significant venture capital, raising approximately $35 million from investors including CMEA Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Menlo Ventures. In June 2012, Schooner Information Technology was acquired by SanDisk for an undisclosed amount, with its team of database and flash optimization experts joining SanDisk's Enterprise Storage Solutions division.