Greening Your Datacenter
Many organizations, from Global 50 corporations and governments to one-person startups and small businesses, are motivated to "go green." Many larger organizations have formal Green Datacenter or Green IT initiatives. There's a lot of innovation around green technologies and processes. Green is good, for good reasons.
Schooner is focused on the very important one that green is the color of both chlorophyll and money (at least in the United States). Most green technologies and initiatives boil down to ways of getting more done while using less energy to do it. Going green is a very sensible and rational matter of increasing productivity. Productivity gains have always been a key driver of economic growth, quality of life, and human freedom.
There's also a vast amount of BS that comes in green. There are way too many green religious zealots and charlatans. There are a lot of hare-brained schemes, subsidies, mandates, and rent-seeking behaviors in green. Many green initiatives are imposed by government coercion because no one would willingly adopt them since they make no economic sense.
You don't need mandates or subsidies to buy Schooner. Schooner makes sense whenever you want to make your datacenter much more productive by doing more with a lot less hardware, and exploiting the energy-efficiency of flash memory to slash your energy usage. Try Schooner and you just might become a zealot — but the good kind, for Schooner.
How Schooner Delivers
No datacenter enjoys wasting energy or money, but they're always constrained by the available technologies and their ROI. Datacenters that run the MySQL database, caching, and NoSQL data stores have to meet demands for more capacity and high performance. Datacenters have responded by throwing hardware at the problem — buy racks upon racks of servers to handle the load. To get the needed performance, shard the data among many servers. But these servers tend to be only 10% to 30% utilized. And whether you utilize a server at 5% or 100%, you still pay for 100% of the electricity needed to run it and cool it. And you have to pay to house it and connect it to the Internet. Server sprawl is a big problem for many datacenters.
Power consumption is one of the largest factors in the overall lifetime cost of datacenters. If you're Google or Microsoft you can afford to build datacenters in Oregon or Washington next to hydroelectric dams for a real advantage in $ per kilowatt. But few firms can do this.
Enterprise-class flash memory offers a solution. Flash is about 100x faster than hard drives and consumes about 1/100th the power of DRAM. Using flash alone can help but the holistic Schooner Software Appliance approach really solves the problem.
Each Schooner software product — SchoonerSQL™ and Membrain™ (the smart memcached, optimized for flash memory) — is bright green. For the datacenter, going green comes down to using technology to do more computing with less hardware and using less power. That's just what Schooner-powered x86 servers with flash memory do — Schooner lets you handle way bigger loads with way fewer nodes. And Schooner-powered nodes exploit flash memory, which is VASTLY more energy-efficient than DRAM.
SchoonerSQL and Membrain utilize the server CPUs and flash drives fully and efficiently. Just one data point from a real customer situation is telling: they replaced 16 x86 servers using a total of 9.00 kW with two of the same x86 servers plus 512 GB of flash memory, powered by Schooner, using a total of 1.35 kW. Your details will vary with actual consolidation levels, your cost of power, rack and pipe, and so on. But we're confident that we can save you money and help you green your datacenter more effectively than anything else on the market.
Where Do Virtualization and the Cloud Fit In?
Virtualization and cloud computing are also green technologies that make great sense for many applications and organizations, by reducing the number of physical servers needed to serve some number of users. But virtualization is best for activities that proceed at a human scale, such as offering virtual PCs to people editing documents. Often virtualization is not enough to speed up database access or caching, since these applications tend to "pin the needle" on the CPU and memory utilization. Virtualization often imposes an unacceptable performance penalty. Cloud deployments of MySQL, caching, and NoSQL are often worse. For all of the ease of use pouring out of the cloud, it really can rain on your parade.
Put SchoonerSQL and Membrain on your servers and you'll get better performance, higher availability, and dramatic server consolidation, at lower cost, than you get on those same servers today. Scale smart, with Schooner. You'll save on capex, opex, and hassle — and you'll be greener in every sense of the word. And if there is a new Ice Age on the way, think of all of the sweaters and space heaters the savings will buy for your staff.