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Supported Platforms

Get the Most out of Your Standard Hardware

Schooner offers two out-of-the-box software products for demanding mission-critical applications, for use on standard Dell, HP, and IBM x86 servers:

  • SchoonerSQL™: This is our full 100%-compatible build of MySQL and InnoDB that offers 99.999% high availability with high performance, guarantees no lost or stale data, does immediate automated failover over LAN and WAN, provides easy unlimited scaling, and simplifies cluster administration.
  • Membrain™: This is the smart memcached, optimized for flash memory through extreme multi-threading to fully exploit multi-core processors.

Recommended Configurations

Schooner products use an innovative software architecture to fully exploit the capabilities of modern commodity x86-based servers, storage technology, and network bandwidth. Here's a list of the main infrastructure elements and considerations to help you get the full benefit of SchoonerSQL and Membrain:

  • Base Server: You can use any HP, Dell, or IBM multi-core Intel (and not an AMD) x86 server or blade running Red Hat Linux 5.4 / 5.5 or CentOS 5.4 / 5.5. Do not run SchoonerSQL or Membrain in a virtual machine (VM), either for evaluation or production deployment.
  • Multiple cores: We optimized our software for maximum parallelism to fully exploit multiple processor cores. Schooner-powered servers deliver great performance when they have at least two 4-, 6-, or 8-core processors, and performance scales linearly with number of cores.
  • Data storage: SchoonerSQL supports the database on hard drives, flash drives (including Flashcache), and SAN. Adding flash memory is an effective way to dramatically boost performance compared to HDDs, and there's no hard limit on the amount of flash memory that may be used on each server. Schooner Membrain is optimized for and requires flash memory; up to 512 GB of flash may be used on each Membrain-powered server.
  • DRAM: We recommend 64 GB of DRAM, especially when using flash memory for persistent storage since our software caches between DRAM and flash to give you DRAM-type speeds from all of the flash. More DRAM never hurts, but you usually won't need it since we fully exploit the flash IOPS to deliver performance equivalent to what you'd get if you used much more DRAM.
  • Ethernet: You can use 1 GB Ethernet among servers with any of our products. You can boost the performance of replication in SchoonerSQL and Membrain by using 10 GB Ethernet.
  • BIOS setting: Many modern servers have a power-saving mode, settable in the BIOS. Turn this off to get the maximum benefit from Schooner software.

Using Flash Memory with SchoonerSQL

SchoonerSQL does not require flash memory, but has unique optimizations to get the full performance possible from flash memory. SchoonerSQL can exploit the high I/O rates of multiple flash drives in parallel. Moving your MySQL database from hard drives to flash drives is a great way to maximize application performance while reducing power consumption, and to achieve extreme vertical scaling.

There are tradeoffs in the economics, performance and capacity in choosing among various flash drives. What about SAS / SATA versus PCIe drives, or SLC, MLC, or eMLC flash? We don't care — we support them all! But we can help you weigh the tradeoffs in moving from HDDs or SAN to on-server flash memory, and selecting the flash memory that gives you the best economics.

See What Schooner Software Can Do For You

Download SchoonerSQL or Membrain for a free 21-day trial.

We're experts in helping you choose the hardware to maximize performance and operational savings. Check out the Tuning Guide that comes with each Schooner product. Or contact Schooner sales, which is happy to help.