The Hybrid-Core (HC) Memcached appliance provides an order of magnitude higher throughput than commodity servers, while maintaining sub-millisecond response time. Additionally, the server is designed to dramatically reduce cost of ownership by slashing power, cooling and maintenance costs. Memcached is an open source, high-performance, distributed memory caching system used in data centers around the world. Many public and private cloud providers have memcached installed to provide faster access to content that resides in storage systems. The appliance is based on Convey’s hybrid-core technology, combining the economies and programmability of industry standard processors with the performance and efficiency of a hardware-based, application-specific design. Performance-critical portions of the memcached server are accelerated directly in hardware — providing seven to 10 times the throughput of a contemporary multi-core server while maintaining sub-millisecond response time. The appliance is completely transparent to the rest of the cluster; one appliance can be a direct plug-in replacement for multiple conventional memcached commodity servers. It runs standard Linux and supports standard fabric interfaces.