Israeli database accelerator startup InfoCyclone Ltd. at this weeks Oracle World conference in San Francisco will show off its flagship appliance designed to help enterprises boost database performance without having to pay for costly server upgrades.
The InfoCyclone acceleration appliance, installed between the application servers and database servers, monitors and analyzes SQL query traffic, identifies the most problematic queries and then executes those queries in its faster, read-only database engine.
The database accelerator is intended to automatically offload read-only query processing from the main database, providing a more efficient mechanism to execute such queries. The benefit for IT is that it can obviate the need for expensive hardware upgrades or fine-tuning of databases when performance degrades and thus affect business performance, according to Haim Kopans, executive vice president of product management and technology at InfoCyclone Ltd. in Tel Aviv, Israel.
“You dont need to buy more licenses or upgrade hardware. You can just plug in the appliance. We take commonly accessed data, load it into the appliance and hold it in main memory. We monitor traffic going to the database, and if we see a query that accesses that data, we trap the SQL statement and direct it to the appliance, then provide the same result the database would have provided, but faster,” described Kopans, who estimated that the appliance can process SQL queries two to 10 times faster than the database.
InfoCyclone analyzes the database log files to determine what data is accessed most frequently. That data is then loaded into the appliance and is kept in sync with the database. The frequency of updates is end-user configurable.
Kopans maintained that not only does the appliance speed execution of common queries, but that offloading those queries also improves database performance for all other activities.
Although the InfoCyclone database accelerator competes with technology from Appfluent Technology Inc., of Arlington, Va., it is bringing new capabilities to market, believes Kevin Strange, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc., in San Jose, Calif.
InfoCyclone is “allowing query transactions against OLTP databases with minimal impact on those databases,” said Strange, who believes the tool brings value to business activity monitoring. “They bring a real value proposition to the real-time enterprise where users need to look up information thats very current,” he said.
But, he cautioned that “they have to be razor-sharp focused on the industries and applications they are going after so they can articulate their value proposition.”
In fact, InfoCyclone is targeting any medium-to-large enterprise that has “ERP, CRM or any business intelligence applications that analyze the database,” said Hugo Georlette, vice president of business development in Tel Aviv.
The appliance runs on IBM xServers and HP Proliant servers with 4GB to 16GB of memory. InfoCyclone also plans to port its software to Intel Itanium 64-bit processors. The appliance is due out in April and will start at $50,000.