Solutions Overview

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:

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.