Today: Aerospike (next-generation NoSQL database)
Company description: Founded in 2010, Aerospike is a privately held company headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with John Dillon the CEO. Aerospike has developed a next-generation NoSQL database that is trusted by enterprises around the world to help them build and deploy hyperscale data solutions with confidence. Unlike legacy NoSQL databases, Aerospike’s unique Hybrid Memory Architecture unlocks the full potential of modern hardware and eliminates all the friction that holds back companies from delivering value from vast amounts of data at the edge, to the core and in the cloud. Aerospike claims to gives enterprises “an unfair competitive advantage at a fraction of the cost and complexity of legacy solutions.”
Aerospike enterprises are innovative and bold leaders in their industries, pioneering transformative digital initiatives worldwide. The Aerospike next-generation NoSQL database helps companies power real-time, mission-critical applications that make digital transformation possible. Aerospike is used for fraud prevention, digital payments, online brokerages, customer 360 and other applications that require extreme uptime, performance and scalability.
Markets: Advertising technology, e-commerce and retail, financial services and payments, telecommunications, media, and online gaming and gambling.
International operations: India, Japan, United Kingdom, Israel; addresses are below
Products
Aerospike Database: The Aerospike next-generation NoSQL database is powered by a patented Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA) that’s proven in enterprises worldwide to fully leverage the power of modern hardware for hyperscale data-driven applications. By storing data on modern SSD devices with only indexes stored in high-performance DRAM, Aerospike’s HMA provides the high-performance advantages of a memory-based cache with the data consistency and persistence of modern SSDs. Aerospike’s HMA is a simpler and easier to maintain architecture that significantly reduces server sprawl and frees staff time to further develop new innovations. With self-healing clusters and high availability, Aerospike is virtually unbreakable, making it ideal for mission-critical use cases that require strict service-level agreements (SLAs) and extreme uptime.
Aerospike Cloud: On March 24, the company announced the debut of Aerospike Cloud, which empowers users to build, manage and automate their own Aerospike database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Aerospike Cloud is based on Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) standards, which enterprises are rapidly adopting to simplify the deployment, orchestration, management, alerting and monitoring of cloud applications across any public or private cloud environment. Aerospike Cloud will be available in the calendar year Q2 2020.
The first release of Aerospike Cloud is optimized for workloads running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and includes the following features:
Kubernetes Operator: Custom Aerospike-specific extensions to the Kubernetes API that encapsulate operations domain knowledge, such as scale-up, scale-down, cluster configuration management and upgrades.
Helm Charts: Deploy Aerospike clusters in a Kubernetes environment using the Helm package manager, a CNCF incubating project.
Prometheus: Integration with the CNCF-graduated monitoring and alerting solution by way of a custom exporter for Aerospike Enterprise Edition and Alertmanager configs.
Grafana: Integration with CNCF member Grafana Labs’ open-source visualization platform through custom dashboards for the Aerospike EE Prometheus exporter.
For more information, see this solutions brief.
Key Features
- Strong Consistency: No data loss. Commit-to-device support for demanding correctness environments.
- Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR): Geographic replication of data by synchronizing data centers through high-performance replication.
- Multi-Tiered Storage Engine: Store data with traditional in-memory, unique Hybrid-Flash, or All-Flash storage architecture to optimize for performance and scale.
- Compression: Provides lossless compression of records written to persistent storage.
- Enterprise Reliability: Fast node restart, rapid rebalance for server upgrades or changes in minutes, and rack awareness to store data across hardware groups.
- Smart Client: Automatically distributes both data and traffic to all the nodes in a cluster. Automatic load balancing of the client improves both performance and correctness.
- Dynamic Cluster Management: Automatic storage and exchange of node information including changes and status with automated triggers for rebalancing.
- Change Notification: Inject change notifications into message queues, or insert them into other databases for reliable and scalable systems.
- Multi-Model: Easy-to-program data structures such as lists and maps improve performance and allow indexed lookups on field values.
- Enterprise Security: Full transport encryption. Support for encrypted storage and in-database transparent data encryption. Authentication, access control, and exception logging.
Aerospike Connect: The Aerospike Connect family of add-on modules makes it easier to integrate the Aerospike Database into both new and existing enterprise infrastructure systems. Aerospike Connect for Spark enables companies to directly integrate the Aerospike Database with their existing Spark infrastructure. In addition, Aerospike Connect for Spark allows companies to combine transactional and historical data stored in the Aerospike Database with streaming event data for consumption by machine learning and artificial intelligence engines using Apache Spark.
Aerospike Connect for Kafka makes it easy for enterprises to exchange data bidirectionally between the Aerospike Database and enterprise transactional systems at the edge and core. It can be deployed in three modes: inbound only, for ingesting data from Kafka into Aerospike; bidirectional, for ingesting data into and out of Aerospike; and developer-enabled outbound, to extract data from Aerospike into custom endpoints not yet supported.
Services
Consulting Services: The Aerospike Consulting Services suite provides hands-on guidance to build scalable architectures for Aerospike. Delivered by experts with a deep understanding of the Aerospike Database and Aerospike Connect, Consulting Services takes a prescriptive approach to ensure a successful Aerospike deployment. The suite has a flexible and scalable model to address the specific needs of all enterprise deployments.
Aerospike Academy: The Aerospike Academy makes it easy to understand and to use the complete features of the Aerospike Database and Aerospike Connect. Developed and delivered by a team of Aerospike experts, academy courses allow operations and development teams to run at the speed of the Aerospike Database. Aerospike Academy offers weekly instructor-led and on-demand training sessions in the U.S., EMEA and APAC regions. All courses include hands-on exercises to put new skills immediately into practice.
Insight and Analysis
From Gartner Peer Insights in a 2019 review by an experienced database administrator: Overall Comment: “Ultra low latency at scale within reasonable TCO and great support. The support from vendor (Aerospike) in responding to queries, whether technical or non-technical, has always been prompt and relevant at all times.”
What do you like most about the product or service? “The product is great and works as mentioned on the tin. The responses received from the Solution Architecture, Support Team as well as Commercial teams have been outstanding.”
What do you dislike most about the product or service? “The training aspects where the customer teams are trained could be made better. Creating video and self-pace learning tutorials would help more developers and support staff learn it faster. Some developers would love to see the SQL support for database. The Backup facilities could be further improved.”
What one piece of advice would you give other prospective customers? “There are many products out there, but choosing one among several dozen is extremely difficult, so I have two suggestions: A) Be absolutely clear on the use-case and the core requirements you want any database product to address as well as understanding the priority order of the requirements. B) Look at the core competence/Pedigree of the ‘Product’ when the product/company was created/formed; almost all vendors extend their products/features over time, but the core aspects of the product are difficult to change. It is this factor that will help you match the product with your requirements.”
———————————————-
List of current customers: AT&T, Adobe, Airtel, Baidu, Banca D’Italia, Lexis Nexis, Neilsen, Neustar, PayPal, Snap, The Trade Desk, Verizon, Wayfair
Delivery: Single-click cloud, managed service, orchestration platforms and bare-metal.
Pricing
Aerospike product pricing is based on an annual subscription. Aerospike services are offered on both a fixed fee and scope of work basis. For more information, contact [email protected].
Other key players in this market: Amazon DynamoDB, Couchbase, DataStax, MongoDB and Redis
Contact information for potential customers: [email protected]
U.S. Headquarters
Aerospike Inc., 2525 E. Charleston Road, Suite 201
Mountain View, CA 94043
(+1) 408-462-2376
India
Aerospike, 4th Floor, No.1, 3rd Main, 100 Feet Rd.
Ashwini Layout, Ejipura
Bengaluru, Karnataka, 560095
(+91) 080-41429824
EMEA
Aerospike
Level 39, One Canada Square
Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB
(+44) 7827 361808
Israel
Aerospike Israel
Brain Embassy TLV
C Building 360
Hashlosha 2 Tel Aviv
Israel
+972-50-4045058
—————————————————-
eWEEK is building a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems, and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.