Clustrix Provides Massively Scalable Database Appliance

As a company, Clustrix (News - Alert) has been around for six years, though its product has been available for the last two. The company’s founder came from Isilon Storage with the intention of building a massively scalable database appliance, and now Clustrix is looking to help solve issues of the cloud and big data.

I recently spoke with Mark Sarbiewski, chief marketing officer at Clustrix, about the company’s history, its position in the space and its vision of the future. In terms of dealing with big data, the key, according to Sarbiewski, is transacting on it. With real-time, fast, online data with millions of users and fat data sets, the issue is that most databases do not scale. These companies use techniques like sharding, or splitting the information across data bases, which blows up the power of the databases, but you have to remember where you put the information and the beauty of the relational database goes away. Essentially, if you don’t want to lose power, you need to scale many magnitudes. Databases built 40 years ago cause problems for companies that need to scale for millions of users.

As Sarbiewski said, propellers were once goof enough, but now you need jet engines. The Clustrix solution is working on a fundamentally different scale, which is what the cloud is all about. It’s not about one giant machine, it’s about lots of compute power parallelized to scale out on commodity infrastructure. Sarbiewski sees Flash as the future, with costs coming down and storage capacity going up, which is great for the cloud.

This year, Clustrix has focused on several initiatives. It has been expanding into the cloud, for one thing, making arrangements with cloud providers such as Rackspace (News - Alert) and others.  The company has also focused on customer acquisition, securing some large retail clients in Japan. This client realized a whopping 90 percent savings and found that it had far less to monitor and troubleshoot. According to Sarbiewski, Asia is an area where Clustrix expects to see plenty of growth in the near future, and he feels that the company is looking to grow rapidly quite soon.

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