• Overview
  • SchoonerSQL
  • Membrain
  • Supported Platforms
  • Pricing and Licensing

What Is a Software Appliance?

Commodity x86 servers get better and cheaper every year. Multi-core processors are now the norm, enabling the execution of multiple programs in parallel for much greater throughput than you could get from a single processor at a much higher clock speed. Flash memory gets better and cheaper every year too. Flash memory is a revolutionary storage and memory technology because it's 100x faster than hard drives, vastly cheaper and more energy-efficient than DRAM, and it's persistent.

That's why x86 servers are a great choice to run your database, caching, or data store software. And that's why datacenters looking for the best economics and top efficiency are moving to flash memory. But even when they use multi-core servers and flash memory, datacenters running MySQL, memcached, or a NoSQL data store often still have big problems of scalability, performance, and availability. They still spend too much on hardware and on the power and people to run it.

That's because most software cannot exploit the full power of multiple cores and flash memory. Cores go unused; flash IOPS go unexploited. Using the best commodity servers and flash drives is good, but it's not enough for maximum datacenter productivity. What you need is some balanced, tightly-coupled way to get maximum value from modern hardware and enable optimal scale-up on each server.

That's where Schooner comes in. Our software products — SchoonerSQL and Schooner Membrain™ (the smart NoSQL data store, based on memcached) — super-charge commodity x86 servers equipped with flash memory. Install SchoonerSQL on a wide range of x86 servers and you bring the full benefits of flash memory to your MySQL shop. Install Membrain on a wide range of x86 servers and you have the ideal device for the particular purpose of running both 100% memcapable caching and a persistent NoSQL data store.

Why Schooner?

MySQL and its standard storage engine, InnoDB, were designed for hard drives and single cores. So were memcached and the related NoSQL key-value stores. Neither InnoDB, memcached, nor any competing NoSQL data store were written to take advantage of the concurrency possible with multiple cores or the properties of flash memory. Users of each often have to commit unnatural acts of sharding, carefully spreading their data across many servers to keep it mainly in the DRAM on each server. The only practical way to scale to get higher performance had been to add servers, which are often badly under-utilized.

Schooner instrumented and carefully analyzed InnoDB to find the performance bottlenecks. We did extensive optimization and tuning to remove them, making InnoDB much more concurrent and efficient. We wrote a highly-concurrent 100% memcapable Membrain, adding true persistence. What's more, both SchoonerSQL and Membrain support fully synchronous replication and automated failover. That slashes application downtime and minimizes the staff time spent on recovery from hardware failures.

SchoonerSQL and Membrain also include unique Schooner libraries that sit on top of the OS to cleverly manage the server's multiple processor cores, flash memory, and DRAM. Our code ensures that the hardware resources are used in a balanced way, eliminating multiple bottlenecks simultaneously. Our software drives far higher utilization of the cores and the flash drives than you'll see from any other off-the-shelf or roll-your-own implementation or MySQL Enterprise with InnoDB, memcached, or any other NoSQL data store.

You can install any old version of MySQL with InnoDB, memcached, or a NoSQL data store on a standard server, add some flash drives, and get decent performance. But your combination of servers, flash, and software won't be balanced; it won't be tightly coupled. So you won't come close to the performance, high availability, and dramatic cost reduction that you'll see with the balanced system you get by installing SchoonerSQL or Membrain on those same servers and flash drives.

We did the hard stuff so you don't have to. To achieve the same yourself, you'd need deep mastery of the application internals to tune them for maximum concurrency. You'd need to replicate the innovations represented in our 15 filed software patents. And you'd have to devote staff or pay consultants to do the system integration, tuning, and testing of your implementation on your servers. You can do all of this, or you can simply use Schooner to beef up your commodity servers into cost-effective database or data store building blocks, and focus on running your business.

Our Software Appliance approach gives you a vast choice of hardware, whether you need new servers or want to use existing servers more effectively. We deliver great performance, rock-solid reliability, plug-and-play compatibility, and amazing ease-of-use. You can see for yourself by downloading SchoonerSQL or Membrain for a free 21-day trial.