Winds of Change: Clustrix Makes Scale-out SQL in the Cloud a Breeze

As the cloud gains more and more prominence in the tech world, smart entrepreneurs are finding their opportunities where they can and making the most of them.

One company doing just that is Clustrix (News - Alert), the leading scale-out SQL database engineered for the cloud. With Clustrix, clients can scale transaction throughput, run real-time analytics and simplify operations. The company uses a combination of intelligent data distribution and distributed query evaluation and processing, so businesses can horizontally scale out by simply adding nodes as their Clustrix database needs grow. Clustrix also provides automated fault tolerance with self-healing for high availability and self-managing operations.

Rollie Schmidt, senior director of business development at Clustrix, says his company’s success is due in part because it took a different approach from its competitors.

“The backend needs to scale out to match the rest of the app and Web tier world,” he said recently. “There’s been no real database innovation for 20 years, so we built things from the ground up. We’ve kept all the good things about SQL from the past decades, but now we’ve made it scale out easily and be intrinsically fault tolerant as well.”

Clustrix has been delivering the product as a turnkey appliance for the past three to four years, Schmidt said.

“In April we announced a decoupling of the product from the appliance hardware on Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) Marketplace, and are now rolling out a new ‘Software Version’ for platforms beyond AWS, too,” Schmidt said. “We did a Limited Preview launch at Cloud Expo in New York recently utilizing Rackspace’s Cloud Tools Marketplace, and in early Q3 we’re going to try it out with a few customers.”

As part of its current expansion, Clustrix last year formed relationships with RackSpace, GoGrid, Blue Box and Equinix (News - Alert).

“We put the appliance in the cloud space, and then offered it as a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) through our partners,” Schmidt said. “And we now offer it self-service in the Amazon cloud, and soon in Rackspace’s (News - Alert) Open Cloud and others, too.”

Clustrix has found that satisfied customers are the best source of new business.

“At first our prospects and customers were telling us, ‘This sounds too good to be true,’” Schmidt said. “But seeing and experiencing is believing. And while they’re our best references, we’ve also started a big social media push as well to get the word out there.”

With a database equally suited to running transactions and capable of processing real-time analytics, Clustrix is well on its way to a strong year and greater market share.

“We’ve got a new major release coming up in Q3, and we continue to refine our delivery model and the new Software Version of the product for additional cloud and reference platforms beyond the Appliance,” Schmidt said. “We’re well on our way.”