The evolution of the Database - from Lotus 123 to the cloud
5 Steps to Bullet-proofing your Online Infrastructure
Black Friday is the Super Bowl for eCommerce. Every Thanksgiving weekend, while our families are eating leftovers and watching football, our whole Ops team is huddled in a back room fighting fires to keep our websites up under the load of 10x traffic.
Craig Thayer is vice president of technology for Sazze where he is responsible for engineering and operations. Sazze is the parent company to a number of fast-growing eCommerce sites, including DealsPlus, BlackFriday.fm, Whym, Pocketly, and Progrids.
I’ve said for years – the best part of my job is meeting amazing customers. After several months of phone conversations, I got to meet in person one such remarkable customer – Mark Price at Mouser Electronics. The impetus? Mark won ScaleArc’s inaugural Uptime Hero award.
I’m just back from a great week at PASS. Four crazy busy days and hundreds of conversations. I wasn’t alone in feeling exhausted or really behind on e-mail – you could find folks sleeping on bean bags or trying to stay connected like in this photo in lots of places every day of PASS.
Database vendors have been attempting to create transparent auto failover capabilities in their database software for decades, to enable zero downtime on mission-critical transactional apps for OLTP environments. The challenge is, apps and databases are intimately connected, and ultimately apps drive databases – not the other way around. All databases can do is respond to queries sent by apps and attempt to stay as “synchronized” as possible with advanced replication technologies. Oracle RAC is a great example of billions of dollars of database R&D spend in an effort to deliver Zero Downtime.
I tell anyone who will listen how databases are the often-overlooked weak spot in app and website availability. I’ve talked to a dozen e-Commerce execs who start our conversations with “We don’t have a downtime issue.” A few minutes in, you end up hearing, “Well, they don’t happen often. Every now and then.”
Not too long ago your IT department was a cost center. But now it’s not just central to your business, it’s your lifeblood. And if it’s done right – IT, and the technology deployed by the IT department, is your competitive edge.
At Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon… the heart of the business is the technology in their data centers. For these businesses there would be no enterprise without IT, and they’ve invested billions of dollars to achieve a “Never Down” status. But it’s not just digital leviathans with billions to spend on capital expenditure that are thrusting IT onto center stage. SaaS offerings and transactions in the cloud have become ubiquitous. This 24/7/365 spotlight on IT infrastructure has galvanized enterprises to focus on new competitive opportunities.
I recently had an opportunity to hear Don Allen discuss with other IT peers some best practices on architecting for zero downtime in database environments. Don’s company, zulily, is an eCommerce retailer that focuses on delivering customers special finds every day, ensuring customers have fast and constant access to the zulily site is essential.
App downtime can come from lots of sources, but ScaleArc is working really hard to make sure databases aren’t one of them. Along the way, we’ve identified some amazing operations and other IT staffers who are changing the equation on app uptime.
To celebrate their successes, we’re launching a customer award program – ScaleArc’s Uptime Heroes. We’ll announce our inaugural winner at PASS, the annual SQL Server user group show, at the end of October this year. We’ll reveal a new winner every quarter.
ScaleArc Founder and CTO Varun Singh recently had the chance to chat with DevOps.com Editor-in-chief Alan Shimel – the result was a fascinating mind-meld of two highly diverse and accomplished technical experts. Alan has founded and advised numerous technology vendors, and he is a compelling personality in industry media. About 10 years ago, I had the good fun of competing with Alan in the Network Access Control market. We had a great time bringing Alan up to speed on how ScaleArc is talking to enterprises about simplifying database scalability and best practices in migrating to the cloud.
This week Gartner published its Magic Quadrant on Application Delivery Controllers – what many customers call web load balancers. Gartner called out ScaleArc as one of the “Other Players” in this market (we don’t yet sell at the volume needed to be included in the quadrant). Gartner highlighted the value of our database load balancing capabilities in the report.
This report marks the third piece of Gartner research highlighting ScaleArc in the past six months. Gartner detailed how ScaleArc is enabling enterprises to achieve zero downtime for apps in these two other reports:
