The headlining feature of the new Varnish Massive Storage Engine (MSE) 2.0 from Varnish Software is cache persistence. This new capability in MSE, an exclusive module of Varnish Plus Web optimization suite, allows Web sites to retain data across restarts and reboots and ensures that, in the case of a system crash, cache content will not be lost. Furthermore, users can repair and maintain their sites as quickly as possible.

Varnish MSE was designed specifically for the high-performance needs of video distribution, content delivery networks (CDNs) and large-cache use cases that require enabling of the Varnish caching layer to handle multi-terabyte data sets. For big CDNs, an empty cache is a no-go, argues Varnish, and reintroducing large cache objects, of the size for which MSE is required, is time-consuming and expensive. With Varnish MSE 2.0, all objects remain in cache with minimal performance reduction.