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VoltDB announced that running its NewSQL in-memory database on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure can deliver up to five times faster application performance than on Amazon Web Services.
Running VoltDB on SoftLayer, enterprises are able to extract intelligence and perform analytics on vast volumes of fast moving data to make real-time, automated decisions and create competitive advantage with faster, smarter applications, VoltDB said.
“IBM is rapidly moving to make SoftLayer the preeminent platform on the planet for developing data-driven applications,” said Mac Devine, director of CloudFirst Innovation and CTO of the IBM Cloud Services Division, in a statement. “Fast data applications demand a leading-edge cloud platform that supports wide-ranging options from multi-tenant virtualization to bare metal performance.”
VoltDB says big data applications help aggregate and analyze stored information collected from widely distributed sources. However, they are not equipped to extract value from data at the moment it arrives. What the company refers to as fast data, such as that coming in from mobile, social, devices, and the Internet of things needs to be acted on immediately and poses unique processing challenges, VoltDB said.
And although certain IT systems can perform basic rules-based processing of fast data, they do so at the expense of being able to interact with data, make per event decisions or provide meaningful analytics. At the same time, the cloud has become the platform of choice for developing data-intensive applications. However, many cloud alternatives sacrifice both network and compute performance in the quest to standardize the components that comprise their offerings, VoltDB said.
VoltDB running on SoftLayer infrastructure and part of the IBM Cloud provides the performance of bare metal and the fast data processing capabilities needed to analyze and make immediate transactional decisions with a single familiar tool, VoltDB officials said. This enables enterprises to develop and deploy next generation real-time applications, such as gaming, sensor management, smart energy, digital marketing, capital markets and distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, that thrive on fast, smart data.
For its part, VoltDB tested a nine node cluster on SoftLayer infrastructure. The bare metal benchmark was run on commodity servers using dual Intel E5-2690v2 processors on SuperMicro X9DRI with 64GB and 10GbE running 64bit CentOS 6.5. VoltDB was directly installed after provisioning; the only additional requirement was to install a Java virtual machine. More details on the testing and results can be found here.
“The recent entry of so many tools addressing fast data speaks clearly to the processing problems data-driven businesses face,” said Scott Jarr, co-founder and chief strategy officer at VoltDB, in a statement. “Solutions like Google’s Dataflow and Amazon’s Kinesis provide some limited capability, but the true value of fast data can only be tapped when interaction with each event is informed by historical data and greater context. Stream processing does not allow for this—VoltDB on SoftLayer does.”
VoltDB also announced its participation in the IBM Cloud Marketplace, an online destination for cloud innovation that brings together IBM’s capabilities-as-a-service and those of partners and third party vendors.