The evolution of the Database - from Lotus 123 to the cloud
5 Steps to Bullet-proofing your Online Infrastructure
In the midst of penning this eCommerce blog series, we got this amazing note from Mouser Electronics, one of our eCommerce customers:
"A few days ago we sustained a sudden hardware failure which caused a hard shut down of our primary SQL Server node without warning. There were over 1,000 active sessions on the cluster at 4,000 requests per second. ScaleArc instantly load balanced the reads to the remaining servers and buffered the write requests while the SQL cluster passed Primary to another node. All kinds of alerts were triggered, but by the time the response team had rushed to their workstations, the ScaleArc/SQL cluster had already handled the situation. The recovery was fully automatic – there was no outage, no dropped sessions, and no tangible customer impact. Impressive." (emphasis added)
Don Allen, senior director of technical operations for online retailer zullily, offered fantastic advice on our webinar yesterday on how to improve availability and performance of online systems. He took the audience through the five steps he follows, with the key point that it’s a circular process – “you’re never done. Each phase just leads back to the first again.”
With several eCommerce companies as customers, we talk to a lot of execs and operations staff about the intersection of technology and the customer experience. We’ll be talking on tomorrow’s webinar with zulily about uptime and making your online infrastructure bullet proof – don’t miss it.
In today’s post, we’ll profile a few concepts tied to improving the customer experience.
This week ScaleArc spoke at the SQL Server Users Group meeting of the Silicon Valley chapter. The topic? Simplifying the upgrade to SQL Server 2014.
The discussion was fantastic. The users asked a lot of great questions to better understand the key challenges of the upgrade. Some notes from our session:
ScaleArc's database load balancing software offers a very compelling value proposition for anyone who wants 100% uptime, transparent failover, zero downtime maintenance, database scalability and easy database upgrades without downtime, and much more.
As the busiest shopping day of the year, Black Friday has spawned traditions like doorbuster sales, people camping out in long lines, and unfortunately, a hastening of the traditional Thanksgiving Day family meal. As retailers both large and small embrace the power of the digital era, consumers are finding that they can now take advantage of these Black Friday sales in the comfort of their own home.
ScaleArc is thrilled to announce today that we’ve been named a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner. ScaleArc was one of only three cool vendors highlighted in the database management systems research area.
We had a great discussion with Alex Gorbechev, CTO at Pythian, Tim Coats, Innovation Lead at Trace3, and our own Varun Singh, founder and CTO at ScaleArc on the results of our recent survey “The State of Application Uptime in Database Environments.” The survey canvassed more than 200 enterprises on their database infrastructure and the impact that planned and unplanned database downtime is having on companies’ critical applications.
ScaleArc recently completed a survey of more than 200 enterprises, gathering data on the relationship between database infrastructure and application uptime.
We talk to enterprises all the time about how the database is creating downtime and how they can improve the situation. Despite our daily conversations focused on the database as a source of app downtime, several of the survey findings caught us by surprise.
