Our Vision
In their day, schooners were the fastest ships on the sea. They were prized for their ability to carry large loads with speed, agility, and minimal crew. Schooners revolutionized global trade and enabled the industrial age by carrying cargo quickly and inexpensively to harbors around the world. Schooner Information Technology was founded to bring that same spirit of efficiency, speed, and innovation to organizations that rely on MySQL or NoSQL for their business success.
The Datacenter Scale-Out Challenge
MySQL and NoSQL are widely used in applications ranging from customer-facing Web 2.0 e-commerce, gaming, and social networking sites to behind-the-firewall financial settlement and trading systems. Datacenters face exploding demands for better performance, easier scalability, and higher availability from users of these applications.
Datacenters often cope with these demands by throwing hardware at the problem — buying truckloads of commodity servers to try to keep pace. That can work, but it's expensive, and so-called "server sprawl" is hard to manage. Moreover, when optimized for the best performance, these servers are often inefficiently utilized. They take up the same amount of space and consume the same amount of power whether they're 20% or 100% utilized, adding to the ongoing operating expense of the datacenter.
Extensive sharding of the data is also usually required to meet the performance requirements. Sharding is time-consuming and requires application-visible changes. Replication and failover, both of which are essential for high availability, are often inefficient and heavily manual.
All in all, scaling MySQL and NoSQL is harder than it ought to be.
Flash memory and multi-core processors offer relief. Flash memory is 100x faster than hard drives, almost as fast as DRAM while vastly cheaper, and is vastly more energy-efficient than HDDs or DRAM. Multi-core processors, such as Intel's Xeon line, offer the promise of parallelism which can greatly speed up database access.
As a result, many datacenters have begun to run MySQL and NoSQL on servers that use flash memory and multi-core processors. But neither delivers on its promise if they're just plugged in to commodity servers. That's because neither MySQL nor any of the NoSQL offerings have been optimized for flash and multi-core processors — they were written for hard drives and single-core processors.
It takes real innovation to fully integrate and exploit these new technologies and deliver massive productivity gains. That's why Schooner was founded.
The Science of Scaling to the Rescue
Schooner licensed the source code of MySQL Enterprise and InnoDB, the standard MySQL storage engine, from Oracle. Schooner instrumented and analyzed the details of InnoDB performance, identified the bottlenecks, and super-optimized it for maximum concurrency. We also wrote a NoSQL key-value store, based on the widely-used Memcached protocol, and tuned it for maximum concurrency.
Once it's tuned for maximum concurrency, the software can exploit multi-core processors and use commodity flash drives efficiently. Schooner delivers balanced systems in which our highly-optimized MySQL and NoSQL leverage the strengths of flash, DRAM, hard drives, and multi-core processors. That brings customers the best performance, scalability, and availability on the market today.
Schooner delivers each solution on a commodity IBM x86 Linux server for sheer plug-and-play compatibility and ease of use. We strive for the simplicity of an appliance. We call them the Schooner Appliance for MySQL Enterprise with InnoDB and the Schooner Appliance for NoSQL/memcached.
They're ultra-fast, scalable, reliable, and green. They're designed to reduce your three-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 60%. They provide extreme reliability with industry-leading high-availability / disaster-recovery features. They're 100% compatible with existing MySQL Enterprise and memcached implementations. They're on IBM x86 Linux servers, and that's what they look like on your network and to your existing management tools. And they enable customers to power a whole new class of revenue-producing applications based on rapid access to terabyte-scale data.
We invite you to explore our web site to learn more about Schooner's mastery of the science of scaling, and how we help customers navigate to easier and more successful datacenter operations and happier end users.