If you mentioned striping in response to my point about huge data, then note that you can get the benefits even on a single machine. If, for example, you have 8GB of RAM, you can run several memcached instances on the same machine, all under 2GB in size, but still have an effective cache size that is close to your potential maximum. Of course in a few years when 64-bit machines become common this advantage goes away, but in the meanwhile memcached works around it pretty much transparently.

But yes, this is not necessarily as useful for the OP's needs as it was for the designers of memcached.