Open Source Database Cost Scaling Dilemma

Open source databases have revolutionized the economics of database management by promising a wide range of businesses the opportunity to build high value systems with a low cost of entry and incremental cost scaling by the horizontal addition of databases. This model is especially attractive for businesses like SaaS, ISPs, social networking sites, and many enterprise systems that need to scale investment as the value of the applications grows.

The problem is that while horizontal database scaling works well for small- to medium-sized applications, large clusters of open source databases are expensive to implement, difficult to manage, and poses a variety of operational risks, including poor availability, data loss, inefficient usage of resources, and problems with performance scaling.

This leaves customers with a difficult choice—invest in the management capabilities to make open source databases work, migrate to far more expensive commercial database systems, or consider even more radical options like discarding SQL databases. In all cases, customers end up with enormously increased costs that severely limit profitability or even cause their businesses to fail.

The reality of the scaling problem is summarized by the following quote from Ryan King, an engineer at Twitter, which recently announced plans to migrate their applications away from MySQL:

“We have a system in place based on shared mysql + memcache but its quickly becoming prohibitively costly (in terms of manpower) to operate. We need a system that can grow in a more automated fashion and be highly available.”

Migrating to another database will require a substantial rewrite even for Twitter, which has a very simple application. What the market really needs is a solution to make existing open source DBMS business manageable:  lower overall cost, raise flexibility, and lower risks of operation as businesses scale.  In short, the market needs a solution to the cost-scaling problem.

How Continuent is different

In Continuent provides a complete solution for implementing and operating scalable clusters of open source databases that can support the needs of the most demanding applications while providing linear cost scaling.  In other words, Continuent Tungsten allows open source databases to fulfill the incremental cost scaling model that makes them so attractive in the first place.

Continuent Tungsten provides:

1. Efficient management to lower operational costs.
2. Automate handling of failures to raise system availability.
3. Built-in backup and data integrity checks to protect against loss of data.
4. Routing and performance scaling to ensure efficient use of resources.
5. And specialized features to support needs of businesses that commonly depend on open source software.

For example, Tungsten includes features like sharding and parallel replication to support multi-tenant SaaS applications.  It includes cross-site replication capabilities allow convenient set up of disaster recovery, which is a common requirement for all high-value systems.

The bottom line is a cost differential that amounts to 30% or less of the cost of high-end commercial DBMS without the risk of migration. The cost differential vis-à-vis open source databases are even higher, as Tungsten enables customers to continue operating inexpensive open source at transaction volumes well beyond the point where the cost graph becomes vertical and those databases become economically infeasible.

The key SaaS business requirements

SaaS companies have a unique set of business requirements to increase profitability and service quality, and lower the operation risks:

• Meeting SLAs - higher service quality, lower risk.
• Managing complex topologies economically - lower cost, lower risk, higher profitability.
• Allowing businesses to add users and services at lower or no incremental cost - higher profitability.

Continuent Tungsten offers high-availability solution that provides high service qualify, thus lowering the risk for the system downtime and allowing to maintain the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

As the SaaS vendors grow, the complexity of their back-end systems increase, often including multi-site operations. This significantly increases management overhead and cost. Continuent Tungsten streamlines the management of the database servers, lowers the cost and increases SaaS profitability.

For multi-tenant operations, moving customers and services efficiently becomes a necessity. Continuent Tungsten allows effective tools to manage customers, move them around and increased capacity while not impacting other customers or maintenance downtime.

The key technical benefits Tungsten offers SaaS

Tungsten solution is well designed to address the technical needs of the SaaS vendors:

• High availability and protection from data loss
• Simple, efficient cluster management and
• Enable and manage complex database topologies

Tungsten offers high-availability, database cluster management and management of complex topologies for multi-tenant architectures.

Tungsten high availability and data protection features include maintaining live copies with data consistency checking and tightly coupled backup/restore integration with cluster management tools.

Tungsten cluster management allows SaaS vendors to migrate customers and perform system upgrades without downtime, thus enabling these maintenance operations during normal business hours.

Tungsten also enables complex replication topologies, including data filtering and data archiving strategies, maintaining extra data copies for data-marts, routing different customers to different DBMS copies, and providing cross-site multi-master replication.

Open Source databases within Enterprise

Enterprises are increasingly adopting open source solutions for business critical and even mission critical applications.

Enterprises choose an open source database as solution platform to help their budgets and avoiding vendor lock-in. But open source databases are lacking in the area of:

• Managing data
• Protecting data
• Maintaining high availability
• Improve resource utilization and
• Raising performance.

The key benefits Tungsten offers Enterprise users

Tungsten provides answers open source databases in the areas of:

• Data Management
• High Availability
• Performance
• Data protection

Database clusters solve a host of problems ranging from improving database uptime to increasing performance. However, existing database management technology ranges from being complicated to downright scary.

Tungsten creates database clusters you to be able to replicate, find and manage data so you can have it all in a solution that you can easily deploy and operate.

Tungsten integrates advanced replication and backups to ensure complete protection from the DBA’s worst nightmare: losing data.

Tungsten provides simple, automated failover procedures to allow applications to switch to replicas quickly, seamlessly, and without risk of data loss. This helps address not just failures but also maintenance, which is the main source of down-time in modern IT environments.

Tungsten delivers speed and flexibility, manages expansion and growth and handles seamlessly database server failures and maintenance operations.

The key ISV business requirements

ISV companies creating reliable, out-of-box applications running on database require  easily and cost-effectively to embed software components and to provide unattended continuous operation:

• Turn-key application operation, including databases
• Unattended handling of failures and outages
• Ability to embed fully within product
• Low COGS for increased profitability

The key benefits Tungsten offers ISV vendors

Tungsten solution is designed to address the technical needs of the ISVs:

• Unattended high availability and data protection
• Simple end-user operations
• Self-contained management and monitoring
• Light-weight, modular design

Unattended high availability and data protection are provided by fully automated failover, easy integration and customization of backups, and automated database consistency checking.

For ISVs to embed Tungsten as part of their applications, Tungsten provides bone-simple database management procedures and zero-data loss DBMS switch operations for maintenance.

When embedded, there is limited or no access to the database cluster.  Therefore Tungsten offers self-contained management tools with fully scriptable operations, and JMX interfaces for management and monitoring.

Continuent offers a wealth of solutions for MySQL and PostgreSQL users proving the following key features in five (5) main categories:

Data Management
Tungsten allows users to manage a group of databases linked through replication as a single, integral unit, using simple commands and without any single point of failure in the system. Data management functionality includes command line management, automatic datasource detection, manager command backgrounding, remote management API, service configuration/removal tool, and simple procedures for updates and maintenanc.

Advanced Data Management features include business rule-driven management with automated failover and management for SaaS multi-tenant systems. Monitoring features include remote monitoring API, event notifications, remote problem diagnosis.

High Availability
Tungsten provides simple, automated failover procedures to allow applications to switch to replicas quickly, seamlessly, and without risk of data loss. High availability issues can be divided between continuous operation during emergency failures (unplanned outage) and continuous operation during maintenance (planned outage).

High Performance
Faster hardware and increasing data volumes raise the bar for application performance. Tungsten offers capabilities that are well-suited to take advantage of multi-core architectures and cheap memory. Tungsten high performance functionality addresses replication issues and load balancing operations.

Data Protection
Tungsten integrates advanced replication and backups to ensure complete protection from the DBA’s worst nightmare: losing data. Tungsten data protection functionality addresses data loss and data consistency issues, backup, and disaster recovery deployments.

Data Integration, Filtering and Archiving
Data integration includes extending to new data sources, replication to/from applications, replication to/from message bus software, and replication to any JDBC-enabled database. Data filtering and archiving features include extensible data filters, data filter libraries, data archive policies, and data archive provisioning.