Massive Database System Without Massive Cost

(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, California. To view the entire library of videos from other industry shows, Road Shows and product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit TMCnet Videos home page.)

How do you handle massive loads of data without building a massive data center? Clustrix has the answer. To find out more, TMCnet’s Erin Harrison sat down with Daniel Liddle (News - Alert), Marketing and Business Development for Clustrix. 

To get started in the industry, Clustrix (News - Alert) built a massively scalable database system that is available at a fraction of the cost of building such a system on site. It is very simple to deploy and does not require changes to the environment or the infrastructure.

Liddle highlighted that scalability is a very difficult problem to solve. The Clustrix system can scale just by adding nodes, fully distributed and parallel. The IT can start with a few nodes and then add many at a time and it will take care of load balancing and failover automatically. This approach simplifies proper development and app launch.

One of the benefits of the system is that it is designed to deploy without disruptions. IT simply drops it in and it looks like a MySQL box. The solution is completely fault tolerant and will operate without disruptions even IT run into problems. They will not have to write customer code.

For the most part, Clustrix is targeting companies building large scale applications; those that need to handle tremendous concurrent workloads. “The system is built to handle massive loads,” said Liddle.

As for what is driving cloud adoption, Liddle noted, “Cloud is a very good place for companies to start out life.”

The cloud can be used to achieve momentum and once established, the company can decide what to do or move off to own data center. This is essentially a lifecycle or stage type issue.

When asked if security still a big concern, Liddle noted there is no fundamental change in the concern, although comfort in growing in various use cases and applications.

Companies should consider a few things before move to cloud, and security is front and center. Cloud is a function of cost and performance in the environment. The main question to ask is: Can you get the right performance for your particular workload?

As for the company’s focus for 2011, Liddle noted they will be building a base of customers and have a lot of momentum going right now. The company will focus on sticking to enhancing and growing the current system and looking at different apps and other issues to build adoption.