The evolution of the Database - from Lotus 123 to the cloud
5 Steps to Bullet-proofing your Online Infrastructure
Sometimes I shake my head at the gadgets you can connect to the Internet these days. A
basketball that tracks your shooting arc? A ”smart” fork that records your eating speeds? No thanks.
But wearable medical devices? Now you’re talking – especially cardiac monitors. It makes a lot of sense to have those devices hooked up to the Internet of Things. One of ScaleArc’s newest customers, Spectocor, leverages continuous monitoring and exception-based reporting to deliver a better patient experience and outcome.
Dell.com has relied on the ScaleArc software for its eCommerce infrastructure for several years – initially to support Black Friday surges and now for zero downtime all year round. In this new video, Dell’s IT director shares several ongoing business and technical challenges facing Dell.com.
One of the best parts of my job is hearing how the IT leaders in our customer base are succeeding in delivering non-stop operations for their companies’ most vital apps. They serve many different industries and sit in companies with a few hundred to 10s of 1000s of employees, but despite those differences, they all have one problem – there’s simply no time for downtime.
Across these many conversations with these innovative CIOs and architects, along with findings from Gartner’s recent data center conference, a picture of the evolving data center is crystalizing. To deliver non-stop operations, they’ve adopted new architectures and new processes – they’re building data centers at webscale. Let’s look at this change in more detail.
Digital transformation. Software-defined business. All companies are software companies. Webscale IT. We have lots of ways of talking about the reality today that companies must have IT people and systems that can reinvent the business. Companies that don’t will fail, even if it’s slowly.
On Wednesday, I was on stage with Judson Althoff, President of Microsoft in the US, for the company’s North America Q3 All Hands meeting. What a fantastic venue and discussion! In front of about 10,000 Microsoft personnel – in person and over the web – we discussed how ScaleArc helps Microsoft’s SQL Server and Azure teams improve uptime and flexibility for applications. Together, we delight our joint customers by enabling zero downtime for apps and simplified cloud migration.
By all accounts, last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday were a huge success for online etailers. Those companies that kept their eCommerce sites up under extreme loads won big while others folded or were crippled by the traffic onslaught.
Neiman Marcus missed Black Friday altogether as its site was completely down for nearly two days, costing millions in potential revenue. Target.com also buckled under the heavy load, and PayPal struggled to keep up.
2016 is off to a rockin’ start with the closing of our $20 million Series C funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from all of our existing investors including Accel Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Nexus Ventures.
At the same time, with the recent passing of David Bowie, I find myself drawn to my favorite Bowie tune, “Space Oddity.” In many ways, the lyrics to this song draw an interesting parallel to ScaleArc after this recent round.
When I’m talking about database architecture and the benefits ScaleArc brings to data flow, I often find myself reflecting on the history of databases; how they got started, what they used to be, and why they exist in the shape they do today. For a timeline of the history of databases, read this article.
You may remember the introduction of FoxPro and Lotus 123 to the market back in the late 80s and early 90s. Those products were, at their essence, a way to manipulate data at a personal level. And they caught the imagination of developers around the world: If you can manipulate data at a personal level, you can do it on a much larger scale. But to do it on a larger scale for, say, an application, something much more elaborate was needed. That more elaborate “something” was a database.
Last week, the research analyst firm Gartner hosted its largest conference focused on the data center. In a series of blogs I’ll be writing over the next few weeks, I’ll recap some of the key takeaways from the sessions I attended.
Gartner kicked off the event with a keynote entitled “The Journey to a Best-in-Class, Enterprise-Defined Data Center Starts Now.” Delivered by analysts David Cappuccio and Thomas Bittman, this session talked about the major shift IT must take in how it delivers IT resources.
I’m excited! I recently ordered a Dell XPS 8900 desktop online. Yes, I was one of the 100 million plus online shoppers who braved cyberspace to take advantage of the traditional Black Friday super deals. In fact, this year’s Black Friday, the biggest one yet, continues to see impressive eCommerce gains. Unfortunately, some eCommerce retailers did not fully fortify their IT infrastructure to handle this online shopping deluge, leading to site wide or intermittent outages and poor customer experience. By the way, metering your website traffic, while that is a band aid to keep your site going, contributes little to user satisfaction.
