Cost-Effectively Scale with Blazing Performance
The Schooner MySQL Appliance offers order-of-magnitude performance improvements over traditional servers. You get blazing speed and easy scalability/server consolidation, since one of our appliances does the work of so many traditional servers, and does it better. "Roll your own" by stuffing a traditional server with more processor cores, more DRAM, and/or replacing hard drives with flash drives, and you'll see an improvement.
But it will be tiny compared to what you get in a turnkey solution from Schooner. On the standard DBT2 Benchmark the Schooner Appliance provides 6x the improvement of just adding SSDs (flash drives) to a traditional MySQL InnoDB server.
You can help by adding large amounts of DRAM memory to a traditional MySQL server, but that's quite expensive, consumes excessive power, increases steady state warm-up and recovery time, and provides only incremental performance benefits. Schooner will still outperform DRAM-heavy servers.
Adding more processor cores allows more threads to be run concurrently. Increasing the amount of DRAM reduces read misses in the buffer pool. Replacing HDDs with SSDs reduces latency and increases I/O rates. But fundamental limitations in the traditional MySQL InnoDB database architecture and design severely restrict the gains that can be achieved from increasing processor cores and DRAM and incorporating flash memory.
The tightly integrated, balanced system architecture of the Schooner Appliance solves the core problems of poor multi-core scalability, serial code paths, low concurrency data structures, and inefficient internal database activities of commit logging, locking, flushing, and check-pointing. You can see the amazing consolidation realized with the Schooner Appliance in a 1-TB MySQL with InnoDB customer scenario. The consolidation results in the reduction of the number of servers from 16 to 2, coupled with a reduction in power consumption from 9 kW to 1.35 kW.
Server Consolidation Enabled by Amazing Performance