Schooner Information Technology Introduces Breakthrough MySQL High Availability with High Performance

Schooner Active Cluster Slashes MySQL Downtime and Simplifies Cluster Administration

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 29, 2011 — Schooner Information Technology, Inc., whose products deliver optimal scale-up and scale-out for MySQL databases and NoSQL data stores, today announced Schooner Active Cluster™ for MySQL Enterprise Edition. MySQL, the world's most popular open-source database, is part of the mission-critical infrastructure of many Web 2.0, cloud computing, and enterprise datacenters.

Schooner Active Cluster enables MySQL shops to scale out using high-performance fully synchronous replication and automated failover among the nodes in a MySQL cluster. Active Cluster, which will be generally available in late April, slashes downtime, eliminates manual failover and recovery, and radically simplifies cluster administration. Active Cluster is a superset of Schooner for MySQL Enterprise Edition, announced and released in February 2011, which enables MySQL shops to scale by adding x86 cores and flash memory instead of servers, cutting the need for servers by a factor of 10.

"Schooner Active Cluster has given us peace of mind, knowing that our MySQL data can be replicated synchronously across servers while driving our servers to perform to their maximum potential," said Ethan Erchinger, vice president of operations and solution architect, Plaxo. "Schooner helps Plaxo provide our customers with the best possible experience."

MySQL databases are usually run on servers in a cluster, with one master database replicated on one or more slaves. Clustering allows parallel read access to data with replication and redundancy that enable service continuity when hardware or software fails. MySQL scale-out deployments use asynchronous replication to deliver high performance, scalability, and availability. Technologies such as semi-synchronous replication introduced in MySQL 5.5 and MySQL Cluster further expand these capabilities.

Schooner Active Cluster represents a new and complimentary approach to building out highly available, high-scalability enterprise applications with MySQL. Active Cluster:

• Guarantees consistency of data among master and slaves by ensuring that each commit made on the master is also made on each of the slaves. Each slave is always current with the master, so there's no chance of inconsistent or out-of-date reads from any slave.
• Slashes downtime with immediate and automatic failover and recovery, transparently shifting the load from a failed master or slave to another Active Cluster server.
• Performs its guaranteed synchronous replication in parallel with executing transactions to deliver high performance with high availability and guaranteed consistency.
• Ensures that each slave is current with the master, avoiding delays in waiting for a slave to catch up with pending transactions before that slave can take over.
• Radically simplifies operations and ease of use. This includes full cluster management from a single pane, one-click clustering, and integrated backup tools. There's no need for manual troubleshooting following a server failure. These same mechanisms also make it easy to take systems off line for preventive hardware or software maintenance with no disruption in service.

"Schooner Active Cluster for MySQL Enterprise Edition slashes the downtime that costs you revenue, customers and reputation," said Jerry Rudisin, chief executive officer for Schooner Information Technology. "Only Schooner has the scale-up and scale-out technology to deliver Active Cluster. It builds on our patent-pending innovations in exploiting modern commodity hardware: using multi-core x86 processors for extreme parallelism, fast flash memory for large capacity and superior performance, and modern networking for rapid replication and failover.

"By using Schooner Active Cluster for MySQL Enterprise Edition," Rudisin continued, "our customers can maximize their uptime and free their scarce DBA staff to focus on new projects that drive revenue instead of datacenter administrative issues and troubleshooting of node failures. We're thrilled to complement and expand the range of applications over which MySQL Enterprise Edition can be used for the most demanding enterprises that need high availability, high performance and superb scalability."

Active Cluster includes the full Schooner flash-optimized implementation of MySQL Enterprise Edition which includes InnoDB and requires no schema, database, or application changes. Active Cluster will be available for download and free trial in late April. It is supported on all widely-used x86 Linux/CentOS servers from HP, Dell, and IBM, with any high-performance flash memory.

Schooner Information Technology is a Gold member of the Oracle Partner Network.

About Schooner Information Technology

Schooner's innovative software products bring optimal scale-out and scale-up to datacenters that use MySQL databases or NoSQL data stores. Enterprises rely on Schooner to slash the downtime that costs revenue, customers and reputation, to shard less, and to handle more data with less hardware. Schooner high-performance clustering guarantees no data loss, provides instant automated failover and recovery, and simplifies cluster administration. Schooner uniquely exploits flash memory to reduce the number of MySQL or NoSQL servers needed and the power, pipe and people to run them. Schooner is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California. Learn more at www.schoonerinfotech.com.

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