Gear6, the two-and-a-half-year-old start-up that kicked off accelerating NFS, is branching out into Memcached, figuring the open source widgetry is going to turn into one of those industry pulse points like web servers used to be before they got ubiquitous.

Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system meant to serve the need of dynamic web sites for a distributed caching tier.

Gear6 says that nearly 70% of dynamic web sites, the fastest-growing segment of the web and represented by social networking, community-based media and aggregation sites, use LAMP- or Java-based software stacks that require a distributed caching tier to scale.

Memcached, it says, has become the de facto standard for this caching tier; 85% of the top 20 sites use the stuff and 50% of the top 5,000.

However, traditional Memcached deployments can require a significant amount of expensive memory and server resources and many don't have high-availability services. Many also have between 7%-30% of their data center servers dedicated to memcached. (Think, oh, say, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL.)

That's the gravy Gear6 is going to stick its bread in.

It's about to officially launch a Memcached appliance called Web Cache sensibly enough that's been out of beta since March and is currently being sold through an early access program.

Joaquin Ruiz, EVP of products, figures that makes Gear 6 first-to-market since rival start-up Schooner Information Technology won't be ready to sell its Memcached appliance until the end of May. Of course, IBM is going to be selling the Schooner gear.

Anyway, the Gear6 widget offers built-in failover and replication; is said to "drastically" reduce the number of memcached servers required; and provides a new level of management and control over memcached deployments.

By focusing on the emerging need for a dedicated web caching tier, Gear6 is promising to dramatically improve the scalability of web applications and databases and the quality of service along with reducing infrastructure cost.

It claims, for instance, that it can cut the purchase and operational price of a 400GB web cache solution from $206k to $68k, cutting real estate in the process from 6U to 2U and reducing power consumption from 1,500W to 500W.

Microsoft has its own alternative called Velocity. It's supposed to launch in Q3.

Gear6, whose biggest competition right now is all the in-house builds of Memcached, is backed by US Venture Partners, InterWest and Horizon to the tune of $20 million.

Its widget is packaged in a 1U rack profile with four flash drive bays, two quad-core processors, a minimum of two modules per appliance, and up to 300GB per rack unit.

Using DRAM-flash reportedly allows five-10 times more memcache memory per unit of rack space and cuts memory cost by 50%.

Gear6 is peddling the thing direct but figures it's got channel potential. It seems to have a three-six-week sales cycle. Pricing starts around $24k-$50k. Figure roughly $70/GB.