Tesora updates OpenStack Trove-based DBaaS platform, adding Oracle support

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1 Tesora updates OpenStack Trove-based DBaaS platform, adding Oracle support Analyst: Matt Aslett 8 Apr, 2015 Tesora recently updated its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform, based on the OpenStack Trove database service, including general availability of support for Oracle Database 12c. The company changed its name to Tesora and its focus to Trove a little over a year ago, but is now established as the primary Trove developer and support provider. The 451 Take Tesora has taken a chance to establish itself as a primary developer and supporter of OpenStack Trove. The next piece of the puzzle, if Tesora is to convert this position into commercial success, is paying customers. We anticipate growing interest in technologies that enable private DBaaS, however, and Tesora is clearly well-positioned to take advantage as interest grows into early adoption. To drive the latter, it is important the company have additional capabilities it now supports proprietary databases with Tesora DBaaS Enterprise Edition, and is working with OpenStack distributors to certify Tesora DBaaS on their offerings. And it continues to have the original Database Virtualization Engine (DVE) technology up its sleeve. Context A little over a year ago, former database-virtualization provider ParElastic announced it was changing its name to Tesora and its focus to Trove, the DBaaS framework for OpenStack. Fourteen months later, the company is now established as a major contributor to the Trove project, and the Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 largest contributor to the Juno and Kilo releases. It also recently updated its own DBaaS Enterprise Edition platform, which is based on Trove but adds a number of additional capabilities, such as support for proprietary databases. Since our last update, the company announced the open source availability of its original Database Virtualization Engine. Up next? Another round of funding and, hopefully, paying customers. If there was any doubt about whether Tesora intended to go 'all in' on OpenStack Trove the Stackalytics website, which details contributions to OpenStack projects, puts it in perspective. April 2014 saw the release of 'Icehouse' and the official inclusion of Trove into the open source Platform as a Service project. Tesora, having at the time just recently announced its focus on Trove, accounted for less than 2% of commits to the Trove codebase. By the Juno release, in October 2014, Tesora was the largest contributor, responsible for 26% of reviews, ahead of the likes of Rackspace, HP, Mirantis and Red Hat. Tesora is currently responsible for 39% of the reviews for the forthcoming Kilo release, and in less than a year has become the third largest contributor to Trove behind HP and Rackspace. It's significant that company has not hired existing Trove developers to boost its code-count. Eleven of Tesora's 18 employees are focused on Trove, two of which (including cofounder and CTO Amrith Kumar) are among the eight core Trove committers. The company is also focused on making Trove more palatable to enterprise adopters via its own Tesora DBaaS offering. Two versions of Tesora DBaaS are available: the Community Edition is a tested distribution that receives maintenance and bug fix updates and features simplified configuration and guest images for open source databases; Enterprise Edition comes with 24/7 support, early access to upstream developments, and guest images for proprietary databases. The guest images are the means by which Trove enables support for multiple databases delivered as a service. While Trove was initially focused on MySQL, the project's scope expanded in August 2013 to enable other databases to be delivered as a service. With Community Edition, Tesora enables support for MySQL Community, MariaDB Community, Cassandra Community, Datastax Community, MongoDB Community, Percona, Couchbase, PostgreSQL and Redis. Enterprise Edition adds support for Oracle MariaDB Enterprise, Datastax Enterprise, and MongoDB Enterprise. Trove itself provides for single-instance provisioning of MySQL and cluster provisioning of MongoDB, Tesora DBaaS adds support for provisioning from inventory and (in the case of Oracle Database 12c) multi-tenant provisioning. Besides supporting proprietary databases via Tesora DBaaS Enterprise Edition, the company is looking to establish commercial reseller agreements with associated vendors to make it easier to provision those databases in an OpenStack environment. Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 The increased focus on Trove and Tesora DBaaS has seen the company's DVE take something of a backseat. Tesora initially saw the opportunity to upsell Trove and Tesora DBaaS to DVE, which offers transparent database scalability. Although it still sees that opportunity at some point in the future, for now it is focused on Trove and Tesora DBaaS. An open source community edition of DVE was released in June 2014, and the company continues to develop the commercially supported Enterprise Edition, which features an additional Web-based management console. Part of the reason for putting on hold plans to upsell Tesora DBaaS customers to DVE is the developer-heavy nature of the Tesora DBaaS user base. Tesora had anticipated interest from large enterprises, and although that has happened, the company reports that adoption is typically led by divisional OpenStack deployments and development and test environments, rather than enterprise-wide strategic adoption. Tesora is convinced that will come, especially as it adds support for more guest database images, but for the moment, it is focused on lowering barriers to entry for adoption, rather than trying to convert users into paying customers. Tesora reports that users are split 50/50 between existing OpenStack users adding Trove, and those that are coming to OpenStack via interest in Trove. But the company's fortunes are obviously still somewhat dependent on enterprise adoption of OpenStack distributions. Tesora DBaaS Enterprise Edition is already certified on Ubuntu OpenStack, Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack and Mirantis OpenStack, with certification on IBM OpenStack and Oracle OpenStack in development. Additionally, certification with VMware Integrated OpenStack, SUSE OpenStack and HP Helion is schedule for this year. Tesora is led by cofounders Ken Rugg, CEO (previously senior VP and general manager of enterprise business solutions at Progress Software) and Amrith Kumar, CTO (previously VP of technology and products at Dataupia, and director of engineering at Netezza). The company has raised a total of $8.7m in funding from the likes of General Catalyst Partners, Point Judith Capital, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. It is currently in the process of raising another round of funding. Competition The biggest competition for Tesora, both now and in the immediate future, will likely come from developers and enterprises looking to develop their own DBaaS platforms of OpenStack Trove itself as part of the core distribution or those from the various OpenStack distributions. As such, the company will be helped by its ability to support for commercially supported databases in Tesora DBaaS Enterprise Edition, and its work with OpenStack distributors to certify Tesora DBaaS on their distributions. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Other potential competitors include VMware's vfabric Data Director and CumuLogic's on-premises DBaaS offering. Potential adopters might look at the various public DBaaS offerings as well, which would make Amazon Web Services, Google and Rackspace potential competitors, as well as the likes of MongoLab, Compose, Elastic and Orchestrate's 'databases as a service' offering. And although DVE has been put on the backburner database-virtualization, competitors here include ScaleArc and ScaleBase, as well as Oracle's MySQL Fabric and MariaDB's MaxScale. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Tesora has successfully taken the opportunity to establish itself as a primary developer and supporter of OpenStack Trove. Opportunities Threats We anticipate growing interest in technologies that enable private DBaaS, and Tesora is clearly well-positioned to take advantage as that growing interest is converted into adoption. The adoption of OpenStack and Trove is still in its early stages, and Tesora is yet to convert its expertise with DBaaS into commercial adoption. There are a lot of big players expanding their commitment to OpenStack. If Tesora is successful, expect at least one of them to decide to take Trove more seriously, and compete more directly with the company. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5