The round includes contributions from Clustrix’ current backers Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and ATA Ventures.

“We have successful production environments running around the world with our appliance — so now the goal is to open up distribution to developers,” CEO Robin Purohit said in an interview. Towards that end, Clustrix recently made the new version 5.0 of its proprietary database available on Amazon Web Services. It’s already available on Rackspace, GoGrid, Equinix and BlueBoxGroup infrastructure.

Here’s how GigaOM’s  Stacey Higginbotham wrote about the initial launch in 2010:

Clustrix [claims] that it’s built a transaction database with MySQL-like functionality and reliability that can scale to billions of entries. Clustrix plans to sell its appliance (which consists of more than a terabyte of memory and its proprietary software) to web firms that don’t want to take on the complicated task of sharding their data (replicating it across multiple databases), or moving to less robust database options like Cassandra or a key value store such as what’s provided by Twitter.

Jesse Proudman CEO of BlueBox, one of Clustrix’s hosting partners, characterized Clustrix as a “‘fire and forget’ solution that takes care of driving scale within MySQL. Its core premise is unlimited scalability without having to build that logic into your application … [it] takes care of MySQL sharding internally.”

Clustrix competes most directly with dbShards if a customer really cares about MySQL compatibility and with NuoDB if they don’t, according to Curt Monash, president of Monash Research.

So when it comes to big-scale, Clustrix has a story to tell, but the market is flooded with rivals. Still, it doesn’t help that the overall cloud database category will be under the microscope given that Xeround, a  MySQL startup, is shutting down this week, as GigaOM first reported on May 1.

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Here’s a primer highlighting the available services (note, we’re talking managed database services, not database instances that users still need to manage and administer) and where they’re running. It’s intended to be thorough, but that can be easier said than done, so please note any omissions in the comments.

SQL services

• Amazon Relational Database Service: One of the first cloud database services, Amazon Web Services’ RDS is now one of the most complete, too. Like most AWS services, it’s tied into the AWS management interface and is compatible with a large majority of AWS’s countless other cloud computing services. Initially just an AWS-hosted and -managed MySQL service, RDS now lets users choose Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database, as well.
• Clustrix Database as a Service: Database vendor Clustrix just got into the cloud game on Wednesday, but it came to play. Its service, which runs on the Rackspace Cloud, gives users the high performance of solid-state drives, the peace of mind of single-tenant deployment, and the scalable MySQL capabilities of its flagship on-premise product. The company claims it’s suitable for both OLTP and OLAP applications, and that it monitors system health across more than 2,500 metrics.
• EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Cloud Database: EnterpriseDB is the primary company commercializing the PostgreSQL database, and this is the cloud-based version of its flagship Postgres Plus offering. Targeting enterprise developers more than weekend hackers, Postgres Plus Cloud includes features such as high-availability clusters, high connection counts and compatibility with Oracle environments.
• FathomDB: Some GigaOM readers might remember FathomDB as the partner that was supposed to give Rackspace a chance to compete against AWS’s then-new RDS. Well, times have changed. FathomDB still exists, but it has open-sourced its original technology to help developers build anything as a service and currently isn’t offering a hosted database service. However, the company claims to be working on a next-generation database service, so stay tuned.
• Google Cloud SQL: It’s not the most feature-rich database around, but Google Cloud SQL does have its benefits. For one, it’s integrated with the rest of Google’s cloud services for easy interaction. And, as is Google’s claim to fame in the cloud, Cloud SQL is geographically replicated for maximum availability. Currently, though, it only supports Java and Python applications, and instances are limited to 10GB in storage capacity.
• Heroku Postgres: Heroku Postgres is the public-facing implementation of platform-as-a-service darling Heroku’s internal PostgreSQL database. It’s designed for reliability and data protection — Heroku claims 99.99 percent uptime and a design targeted to hit 99.999999999 percent data durability — and tries to bring the Heroku experience to developers that can’t use its PaaS offering. One of its more interesting features is called Data Clips, which lets users send the results of a SQL query to someone else via a URL.
• HP Cloud Relational Database for MySQL: What is there to say about this service that the name doesn’t already? For starters, it’s presently in private beta, so there’s still a lot of work to be done and a lot of features to be added. It’s also built atop an OpenStack-based MySQL distribution, which, in theory, should make it easier to move one’s database business from cloud to cloud if need be.
• IBM SmartCloud Application Services: Like HP, IBM’s cloud database is still very much a work in progress. Details on specific features are sparse right now, other than that the service is based on IBM’s DB2 Server technology and is part of the SmartCloud Application Services (read “PaaS”) offering that’s currently in a pilot phase.
• Microsoft SQL Database: Formerly known as SQL Azure, SQL Database is a critical component of Microsoft’s new focus on hybrid cloud computing. Yes, it can operate as a standalone cloud database, but it also provides a shared user experience with Microsoft SQL Server and allows for data sharing with on-premise SQL Server databases. There’s also an option for syncing between other SQL Database deployments elsewhere within a company’s cloud infrastructure.
• Oracle Database Cloud Service: It’s not for everyone, but existing Oracle database users that want a cloud-hosted option certainly should appreciate the Oracle Database Cloud Service. After all, it claims all the features and performance of Oracle Database 11g Release 2, of which there are a lot. Pricing isn’t made clear, but it’s a monthly rate based on the size of your database, although there are no long-term contracts.
• Rackspace Cloud Databases: The latest addition to Rackspace’s line of cloud offerings, Cloud Databases is first built from its inception atop the OpenStack platform. Still in early access mode, users won’t get SLAs or a host of features (such as monitoring, backups or a GUI) that are slated for the GA edition, but they will get promises of high performance and reliability thanks to the service’s container-based virtualization and storage-area network-based architecture.
• Xeround: Save for Amazon RDS, Xeround might be the most-popular cloud database around. It’s also the most flexible in terms of where it can be deployed — the MySQL service can run atop pretty much any public cloud, including AWS, Rackspace, Joyent, Heroku … you get the picture. Xeround claims auto-scaling as one of its primary strengths and is architecturally unique in that it’s essentially a MySQL frontend atop a foundation that theoretically could support a variety of database options.

NoSQL services

• Amazon DynamoDB: DynamoDB is AWS’s managed NoSQL service based upon the original Dynamo kay-value data store the company developed years ago for its internal purposes. Designed for web or big data applications needing fast access to data and potentially having to scale in a hurry, DynamoDB is built atop an SSD architecture and scales automatically as data is added to the system.
• Amazon ElastiCache: It’s not technically a NoSQL service, but ElastiCache does fulfill a similar need by giving developers managed Memcached to make sure their MySQL deployments are serving user data as fast as possible. Memcached is used by many web applications, including Facebook, that are built upon disk-based relational databases but want to keep certain data in an in-memory cache.
• Cloudant: Although it’s based on the open source CouchDB database, Cloudant doesn’t call itself a NoSQL service per se, but rather a Data Layer. Built across a collection of cloud-provider resources spanning the globe, it does offer a predictable scalable NoSQL data store, but also a built-in MapReduce analytics engine. That’s one reason agribusiness giant Monsanto uses Cloudant to underpin its genomics infrastructure.
• Database.com: Salesforce.com’s standalone database service, Database.com, isn’t exactly NoSQL, but it isn’t exactly a relational database, either. What it is for sure is the same multitenant database architecture that has been underneath Salesforce.com’s CRM service and Force.com platform for years. It stores a variety of data types, including of the unstructured variety, and is designed for (although not limited to) applications tying into existing Salesforce.com services.
• Microsoft Windows Azure Table Storage: This is the NoSQL data store for Windows Azure, which is designed for easily querying terabytes of non-relational data. Because it’s part of the overall Windows Azure Storage family, though, total database size is limited to 100TB overall (Blob, Table and Queue storage) per account.
• MongoHQ/MongoLab: MongoDB is by far the most-popular NoSQL database around, but it can be a bear to manage in the cloud. As a result, there are numerous hosted MongoDB services around, although MongoHQ and MongoLab are probably the most widely known. The pitch for both is simple: fast deployment, thorough monitoring and reliability you probably can’t achieve yourself. Both services try to appeal to a broad range of users with both shared and dedicated offerings.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Oleksly Mark.

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Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions.

During an interview this week, Stonebraker explained to me that Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve. I’m checking with Facebook to verify the accuracy of those numbers, but Facebook’s history with MySQL is no mystery.

The oft-quoted statistic from 2008 is that the site had 1,800 servers dedicated to MySQL and 805 servers dedicated to memcached, although multiple MySQL shards and memcached instances can run on a single server. Facebook even maintains a MySQL at Facebook page dedicated to updating readers on the progress of its extensive work to make the database scale along with the site.

The widely accepted problem with MySQL is that it wasn’t built for webscale applications or those that must handle excessive transaction volumes. Stonebraker said the problem with MySQL and other SQL databases is that they consume too many resources for overhead tasks (e.g., maintaining ACID compliance and handling multithreading) and relatively few on actually finding and serving data. This might be fine for a small application with a small data set, but it quickly becomes too much to handle as data and transaction volumes grow.

This is a problem for a company like Facebook because it has so much user data, and because every user clicking “Like,” updating his status, joining a new group or otherwise interacting with the site constitutes a transaction its MySQL database has to process. Every second a user has to wait while a Facebook service calls the database is time that user might spend wondering if it’s worth the wait.

Not just a Facebook problem

In Stonebraker’s opinion, “old SQL (as he calls it) is good for nothing” and needs to be “sent to the home for retired software.” After all, he explained, SQL was created decades ago before the web, mobile devices and sensors forever changed how and how often databases are accessed.

But products such as MySQL are also open-source and free, and SQL skills aren’t hard to come by. This means, Stonebraker says, that when web startups decide they need to build a product in a hurry, MySQL is natural choice. But then they hit that hockey-stick-like growth rate like Facebook did, and they don’t really have the time to re-engineer the service from the database up. Instead, he said, they end up applying Band-Aid fixes that solve problems as they occur, but that never really fix the underlying problem of an inadequate data-management strategy.

There have been various attempts to overcome SQL’s performance and scalability problems, including the buzzworthy NoSQL movement that burst onto the scene a couple of years ago. However, it was quickly discovered that while NoSQL might be faster and scale better, it did so at the expense of ACID consistency. As I explained in a post earlier this year about Citrusleaf, a NoSQL provider claiming to maintain ACID properties:

ACID is an acronym for “Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability” — a relatively complicated way of saying transactions are performed reliably and accurately, which can be very important in situations like e-commerce, where every transaction relies on the accuracy of the data set.

Stonebraker thinks sacrificing ACID is a “terrible idea,” and, he noted, NoSQL databases end up only being marginally faster because they require writing certain consistency and other functions into the application’s business logic.

Stonebraker added, though, that NoSQL is a fine option for storing and serving unstructured or semi-structured data such as documents, which aren’t really suitable for relational databases. Facebook, for example, created Cassandra for certain tasks and also uses the Hadoop-based HBase heavily, but it’s still a MySQL shop for much of its core needs.

Is ‘NewSQL’ the cure?

But Stonebraker — an entrepreneur as much as a computer scientist — has an answer for the shortcoming of both “old SQL” and NoSQL. It’s called NewSQL (a term coined by 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett) or scalable SQL, as I’ve referred to it in the past. Pushed by companies such as Xeround, Clustrix, NimbusDB, GenieDB and Stonebraker’s own VoltDB, NewSQL products maintain ACID properties while eliminating most of the other functions that slow legacy SQL performance. VoltDB, an online-transaction processing (OLTP) database, utilizes a number of methods to improve speed, including by running entirely in-memory instead of on disk.

It would be easy to accuse Stonebraker of tooting his own horn, but NewSQL vendors have been garnering lots of attention, investment and customers over the past year. There’s no guarantee they’re the solution for Facebook’s MySQL woes — the complexity of Facebook’s architecture and the company’s penchant for open source being among the reasons — but perhaps NewSQL will help the next generation of web startups avoid falling into the pitfalls of their predecessors. Until, that is, it, too, becomes a relic of the Web 3.0 era.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user jimw; error image courtesy of Flickr user rubenerd.

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The reality is that volumes are growing for all types of data, not just the unstructured data that might lead businesses to consider any of the emerging NoSQL or non-SQL database technologies. Organizations doing millions of transactions or otherwise producing relational data want products that meet their needs, too, and they want them to be minimally disruptive in terms of learning new technologies and rewriting applications. It’s hard to get less disruptive than keeping the database layer essentially the same.

Presently, most attempts to scale relational databases involves concepts like sharding or implementing a cache system, so Clustrix’s approach of scaling out the database itself by adding nodes is understandably attractive to customers. Thus far, the only other startup making noise around high-performance, scalable SQL is VoltDB, which focuses on online transaction processing. Just like NoSQL projects have proliferated to solve various problems related to unstructured data, Clustrix’s early success suggests that attempts to build scalable SQL databases might start ramping up, too.

An interesting side note to the Clustrix announcement is how it underscores the notion that SQL and NoSQL databases can coexist within the same organization. Clustrix customer AOL recently announced its work with NoSQL startup Membase (and Hadoop vendor Cloudera) around turning large volumes information on user events into a high-speed, targeted ad-serving system.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons contributor Andreas Praefcke.

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Clustrix’s flagship product is a clustered database appliance that the company claims combines NoSQL scalability with MySQL functionality. As Stacey pointed out upon the company’s launch, it sounds the Holy Grail of Internet-scale data management, but there might actually be something behind the great story. In October, Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger joined Clustrix’s executive advisory panel. This is significant because Facebook created the popular Cassandra NoSQL database, and part of Clustrix’s aim is to convince customers that they need not make the functionality sacrifices inherent in tools like Cassandra in order to achieve the same level of scalability. (Of course, Facebook is still an avid MySQL user, as it has made clear on numerous occasions.)

Heiliger’s decision to join the Clustrix board, as well as the advent of competitors such as the Michael Stonebraker-founded VoltDB, led me to ask a couple of months ago whether scalable SQL offerings will keep NoSQL databases from ever really getting off the ground, at least in cases where a relational database can do the job. Clustrix Founder and CEO Paul Mikesell thinks this is the case: “We think that both will exist, but we’re quite convinced now that the bulk of that is going to remain SQL-based.”

It might be easy to nay-say companies such as Clustrix because, really, they often end up competing with database stalwarts like Oracle in order to make sales. But, if Mikesell has proven anything over his career, it’s that he knows how to build clustered data systems that work; he founded clustered file system proprietor Isilon Systems, which EMC recently bought for $2.25 billion. Clustrix has a sales team full of former Isilon employees, in fact, and claims to have some big-name customers already on board, some of whom we can expect to hear about early next year. Additionally, new VP of Sales George Reitz helped webscale-server vendor Rackable Systems (now SGI) grow its revenues to $10 million a year to $360 million a year, selling to, ostensibly, the same customer base.

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“Clustrix has built a truly impressive Clustered Database System from which Internet-scale businesses can benefit,” said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook VP of technical operations in a press statement. When writing about the company back in May 2010, Stacey pointed out that this clustered database system was webscale’s Holy Grail.

Paul Mikesell — CEO of Clustrix and the former co-founder of storage system success story Isilon — told Stacey the appliance being built by his company would be ideal ” for companies managing large amounts of data, such as big travel, e-commerce and social websites.” Heiliger believes that CDS can “make it very easy for fast-growing companies to scale their infrastructure, and enhance reliability, while driving down cost and complexity.”

Clustrix is backed by Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), and ATA Ventures.

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Investors Reach into Their Pockets…

• Washington, D.C.-based Virtustream closed a $40 million first round aimed at bridging the gap between corporate data centers and its own via its xStream cloud management platform.
• Cloud.com (formerly VMOps) raised $11 million in a Series B round for its CloudStack solution, which helps providers and individual companies turn their existing virtualized data centers into private clouds.
• Big data startup Clustrix proved the importance of cloudscale data management, presenting itself to the world on the heels of $18 million in initial funding. Open-source database projects like Cassandra and HBase are popular among web types, but this is the type of solution that could convince some of them to give up their DIY database cultures.

As Do Big Vendors…

• IBM’s purchase of Cast Iron Systems has been covered to death, but the technical gist is that the Cast Iron platform will help customers integrate on-premise and cloud-based data, making SaaS migration more palatable (and letting IBM keep their business through this transition).
• New VMware property SpringSource bought GemStone Systems to ensure customers’ data layers can scale alongside the CPU layer as application demand increases. GemStone works fine on-premise and will be integrated with several SpringSource products.

As Do Customers…

Need more proof that life is good in the cloud? How about Rackspace’s first-quarter earnings call, during which it touted considerable cloud growth? The Rackspace Cloud represents only a fraction of total revenues (although it’s still growing), but more than 80 percent of the company’s nearly 100,000 customers. Some believe cloud computing has dot-com-like bubble potential, but Rackspace’s customer count is no mirage, and I don’t believe vendors like IBM, CA and VMware would invest as heavily as they are into a model for which they don’t foresee high ROI. Some cloud startups will fail, no doubt, but unlike so many dot-coms, cloud companies have real products that will find their way into other vendors’ portfolios and make money for someone. Read the full article here.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Tim Patterson

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This is big stuff. Indeed, Paul Mikesell — CEO of Clustrix and the former co-founder of storage system success story Isilon — said the goal is to use its appliance to solve a growing problem for companies managing large amounts of data, such as big travel, e-commerce and social websites. As the web grows more social, companies are trying to keep track of more pieces of data about users and their relationships to other users. This creates complicated and large databases that can slow down access to user information, and thus the end user experience.

We’ve written about myriad attempts to solve these data scalability problems, attempts that have spawned appliance startups and whole branches of code designed to help sites scale their data, from Hadoop to Cassandra to Twitter’s Gizzard. Mikesell said the product could replace the need for caching appliances such as those offered by Schooner or Northscale, but could also work in conjunction with them.

As for some of the open source options, new programming languages like Bloom, or cloud-based scalable databases such as Microsoft’s SQL Azure or Rackspace’s partnership with FathomDB, Mikesell is confident that the ability to replicate the functionality of a relational database at webscale without sharding or tweaking the existing code is powerful enough that customers would pay $80,000 for a 3-node machine containing the software. There are plenty of companies reluctant to trust the open-source spin-outs from companies like Twitter and Facebook.

The market is clearly there for scalable relational database products (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d), so if Clustrix can take the $18 million invested in it from Sequoia, ATA Ventures and US Venture Partners and turn it into an Isilon-like exit, more power to it.