Business Whitepaper. Selecting The Right Database For Applications In The Cloud. Exec Insight

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1 Selecting The Right Database For Applications In The Cloud Application migration, software-as-a service deployments and reduction of app lifecycle costs all depend in part on selecting the right database for the cloud. Exec Insight

2 Executive Summary Traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) were designed 30 years ago before today s modern datacenters and cloud computing took center stage. At their core these original RDBMS were not designed for meeting the business, cost and technical needs of today s software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers or for offering efficient operation in the commoditized datacenter. To accommodate the seismic shift new infrastructures are creating, independent software vendors (ISVs), software vendors, and application service providers (ASPs), are re-architecting their applications to future-proof them and to drive both short and long-term profitability. They are heeding the relatively short but impressive history of Salesforce.com (SFDC) to understand what s at stake. SFDC re-invented the customer relationship management (CRM) market by being first to deliver an innovative and scalable CRM solution as SaaS. Established CRM competitors failed to recognize the inherent advantages of the SaaS delivery model, and continued to offer and promote their on premisebased CRM. As a result, today Salesforce.com dominates the global CRM market and last year was named the World s Most Innovative Company by Forbes. According to Gartner Research in a May 2014 report, Salesforce grew 24.7% faster than its nearest competitor from 2012 to 2013, attaining 30.3% growth in worldwide revenues. Their closest competitor grew by just over 12% during the same period. Established software companies are now migrating their premise-based applications to the cloud. Also all ISVs are seeking to reduce the pain, complexity, inflexibility and cost associated with offering their applications. Often the gating factor to reaching this desirable state is getting the database to go along. Applications must be deployed on top of DBMS that avoid the legacy technical and economical shortcomings of older DBMS solutions. In other words why modernize an application on top of a 30-year-old DBMS architecture? When I started what became NuoDB, the time for variations on existing themes was past. If databases were to scale, a whole new approach was required, one unsaddled by ancient assumptions. Jim Starkey NuoDB Technical Founder and Strategic Advisor Why Bother? Aside from the monster success of Salesforce, ISVs, ASPs and traditional software vendors know quite well that the SaaS subscription model trades upfront license payments for a greater customer lifetime value and more predictable revenues over time. SaaS also streamlines maintenance and upgrades, and the launch of new product features. No more encouraging (or forcing) customers to upgrade to the latest release. An entire customer base can be seamlessly upgraded in one action. SaaS and the cloud help deliver product innovation faster; address customer requests for enhancements faster and improve the overall customer experience, leading to long-lasting relationships. But again there s often a gotcha in harnessing all these benefits. Too often traditional software vendors spend enormous amounts of time and effort trying to make their databases go along with a migration to the cloud or a move to SaaS. Even developing and deploying brand new apps can be a difficult endeavor if the process starts with a scale up not scale out approach. 1

3 The Challenge Traditional databases scale up - not out - then back in - as demand changes. Scaling them requires bigger and bigger machines and/or complex workaround solutions like sharding, partitioning, or replication, to name a few. Originally architected for client/server applications deployed in enterprise datacenters, the traditional RDBMS can certainly be engineered to support cloud and SaaS applications, but doing so is generally costly and involves performance and scalability tradeoffs. The basic nature of the cloud is all about flexibility and paying only for the necessary resources and only as needed. Similarly a bona fide, cloudnative database is designed to act in the same fashion technically while also eliminating expensive, legacy database licensing. The cloud motto whether it be a public, private or hybrid cloud don t pay for what you don t need until you need it. Besides being architected for scale out/in performance, automated administration and rolling upgrades/maintenance, a true cloud-native database must also be in multi-tenant. Each customer s database maintains its own physically separate archives and runs its own set of security credentials. Each customer database has its own set of database processes, and machine hosts can be shared securely amongst databases to increase operational efficiency. Application vendors can modernize and future-proof their technology by selecting a database specifically designed from the ground up to run in the cloud and/or commoditized datacenters. Why NuoDB? Because NuoDB was designed specifically for the cloud, it provides the benefits ISVs, ASPs and traditional software vendors are looking for straight out of the gate. NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that offers simplicity, the flexibility of scale out/in to respond automatically to changes in demand, continuous availability, and active/active operation across datacenters. The NuoDB database is secure, flexible enough to solve a variety of problems, easy to automate and resilient in the face of failure. Just like the cloud. Design matters and architecture matters. It was important that we match our horizontally scalable application with a horizontally scalable data model. Dave Duggal Founder and Managing Director, Enterprise Web Starting with its distributed architecture, NuoDB provides a powerful building block for on-premise, public cloud or any other deployment model that needs active-active properties. Deploy a single, logical database in multiple locations simultaneously. It doesn t matter where your datacenters are located. Then a cloud-scale database should be easily administered as a collection of processes that are logically addressable as a single SQL service. Simply start by provisioning a host and then ask that host to take on transactional or durability workloads. All of this should be accomplished without the extra effort of sharding or building an explicit replication processes. NuoDB accomplishes this via its auto administration feature, a template-driven approach to streamline deployment; enforce your service-level agreements; and streamline administrative tasks and maintenance. 2

4 Figure 1: NuoDB s distributed architecture is split into three layers; an administrative tier, a transactional tier and a storage tier. NuoDB s distributed three-tier architecture decouples management, transactions, and storage, meaning each tier can scale a single, logical database elastically. It scales linearly to improve transactions per second performance and handle both concurrency and data volume so that providers can scale applications out and in by simply adding or removing processes. New processing nodes can be introduced to a running database and become effective immediately. The NuoDB architecture also automatically provides continuous availability, rolling upgrades, built-in data redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities. App Broker Broker App TE TE SM SM Host 1 Host 2 Figure 2: NuoDB s Transaction Engines (TEs) and Storage Managers (SMs) are deployed as independent processing nodes with access to a common database, eliminating any single point of failure and allowing software vendors to ensure continuous availability. 3

5 As an active/active system, NuoDB is a network of independent processing nodes, each having access to a common database so that the service will continue even if system components fail. NuoDB provides application vendors with peer-to-peer, on-demand independence that yields high availability plus low-latency and a deployment model that is easy to manage. Conclusion Traditional DBMS were not designed to meet the needs of applications running in the cloud or modern datacenters. For ISVs, ASPs and software vendors to benefit from the technical and economic efficiencies of today s distributed computing, they must select a database that facilitates a move to the cloud and/or the modern datacenter. Software companies can future-proof their applications; drive short- and long-term profitability and offer their customers the most flexible, innovative applications by capitalizing on the cloud-native nature of the NuoDB webscale distributed database. For a free download: About NuoDB NuoDB was launched in 2010 by industry-renowned database architect Jim Starkey and accomplished software CEO Barry Morris. It delivers a webscale distributed database management system specifically designed for the cloud and the modern datacenter. Used by thousands of developers worldwide, NuoDB s customers include automotive after-market giant AutoZone, Europe s second largest ISV Dassault Systèmes, Zombie Studios and many other innovative organizations. NuoDB was one of only nineteen vendors cited on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational DBMS. If you are a company that wants to expand its database capacity and buy from Oracle, you need to scale up. This means that you have to buy expensive hardware and software that is engineered for peak demand. With NuoDB, a company can scale out meaning that it can inexpensively expand and contract its processing power through the cloud and have much less waste. Mitchell Kertzman Former Chairman of the Board and CEO, Sybase, Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners NuoDB is based in Cambridge, MA. For further information visit: 4

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