Schooner Ships Upgraded MySQL, NoSQL Storage Appliances

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-Schooner Information Technology, a new provider of solid-state data access appliances for Web 2.0 enterprises, cloud computing and enterprise data centers, on April 13 started shipping upgraded versions of its products for MySQL and NoSQL.
One year to the day after emerging from stealth mode, the two-year-old startup made the announcement at the MySQL Conference, which continues through April 15.
Schooner’s servers use a combination of solid-state disks-NAND flash and DRAM (dynamic RAM)-in a new, proprietary architecture to provide high-performance and high-availability disaster recovery and storage capabilities for data centers of any size.
The appliances are so powerful and capacious that customers have reported that one unit is often able to replace 10 or more standard servers in a data center, CTO and co-founder John Busch told eWEEK.
The new Schooner appliances for MySQL Enterprise with InnoDB and for Memcached/NoSQL include the following improvements, Busch said: improved “optimization of the MySQL and Memcached software, flash memory, DRAM and multicore Intel processors;” a new, “flash-based NoSQL key-value store based on the Memcached API;” an extension of “the Memcached implementation to be 100 percent memcapable, including Binary Protocol; and” an extension of the administrative tools to include “a command line interface compatible with the widely used Cisco IOS interface.”
NoSQL is a 12-year-old class of nonrelational data stores that break away from a long history of relational databases. These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations and typically scale horizontally.
Examples of a NoSQL production implementation include Google’s BigTable and Amazon.com’s Dynamo, both home-developed. Open-source variants include HBase and Cassandra.
Schooner’s appliances substantially improve server and storage I/O performance over standard data center components, enabling both consolidation of numerous older servers and reduced power draw, Busch told eWEEK.
“We’re able to take generic, open-source tools and put them into a suite that is easy for [storage and database] programmers to use,” Busch said.
Oracle’s “Sun Microsystems/MySQL … has officially certified the Schooner MySQL Appliance as a completely compatible solution that delivers full ACID-compliant (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) MySQL with InnoDB,” the company said.
The statement continued, “The Schooner Appliance for Memcached/NoSQL supports both 100 percent memcapable Memcached and a persistent key-value store with enterprise-grade HA/DR features. Customers use this appliance both for super-fast high-capacity caching and for a scalable NoSQL data store without the overhead of ACID compliance and full SQL queries. Schooner’s unique container mechanism allows multiple caches and key-value stores, each with its own replication and recovery properties, to share the same appliance.”
Pricing for the appliances is in the $45,000 range. For more information, go here.