Memcached, released in 2003, is the older product of the two. It's a general-purpose, distributed key-value store. The original goal of the project was to offload databases used in web applications by storing the cached values in memory. Memcached is distributed by design. Since version 1.5.18, it is possible to restart the Memcached server without losing the contents of the cache. This is possible through the use of RAM disk as a temporary storage space.
It uses a simple API that can be operated via telnet or netcat or using bindings for many popular programming languages. There aren't any bindings specifically for C++, but it's possible to use the C/C++ libmemcached library.