Schooner Outpaces Fusion-io by 2-to-1 and Intel by 4-to-1

Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a provider of scalable turnkey data-access appliances, announced the availability of Release 2.5 of the Schooner Appliance for MySQL Enterprise with InnoDB and the Schooner Appliance for Memcached/NoSQL.

Based on the industry-standard database transfer (Database Test or DBT) benchmark, the Schooner MySQL Appliance is over two times faster than a MySQL server based on Fusion-io with MySQL 5.5.4; over four times faster than a MySQL server using MySQL 5.5.4 with Intel solid state drives (SSDs); and over eight times faster than a MySQL server using MySQL 5.5.4 and hard disk drives (HDDs). This MySQL performance is delivered through holistic optimization and integration of the software and hardware. It enables better application performance while significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) through dramatic server consolidation.

The Schooner Release 2.5 provides
the following new capabilities
and customer value:

• MySQL multi-instance support: Enables multiple instances of MySQL to be easy consolidated and centrally managed, with per-instance resource allocation and configuration, bringing Schooner’s performance benefit to a broader range of applications and customers;
• MySQL large connection performance: Delivers stable throughput to well beyond 20,000 connections, enabling performance-hungry applications to effectively scale under high load;
• Enhanced high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR): Significantly reduces failover and recovery times, enabling customers to achieve dramatic server consolidation with very low risk;
• Optimized caching for any workload: Added support for write-back caching from DRAM to flash memory for optimized and user-configurable Memcached/NoSQL performance;
• Compatibility with latest Memcached standards: 100 percent compatibility with latest standards, including simple authentication and security layer (SASL), binary protocol, and large objects, enabling easy adoption.

37signals, a trailblazing, web-based software applications company whose products are used by millions of people around the world, implemented Schooner’s MySQL appliance for its popular Basecamp project management platform: "We recognized an urgent need to upgrade our Basecamp MySQL database after moving into our new datacenter," said Mark Imbriaco, operations manager, 37signals. "We chose Schooner because its appliances were not only 300 percent faster than our old setup, but they also allowed us to consolidate, using significantly less power and space. We were up and running quickly with no unexpected additional costs."

The latest Schooner Appliances outperform any other MySQL, caching and key-value store solutions on the market. Schooner customers enjoy server consolidation of more than eight to one; a greater than 90 percent reduction in downtime; and a five- to eight-times speedup of typical MySQL queries. The Schooner Appliances can be configured with ½ TB to 1 TB of  flash memory, enabling new classes of applications to store and access their data in an optimized storage hierarchy of flash memory, DRAM and hard drives. Schooner’s approach markedly boosts performance, reduces power consumption, and improves availability compared to other approaches based on flash drives or even pure DRAM.

"Our customers see a clear correlation between the performance of their applications and their ability to drive and grow their business. However, historically, scaling performance required a significant increase in infrastructure cost and complexity," said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of products, Schooner Information Technology. "We are excited about our latest releases because they help address this fundamental issue, by enabling true scale-out with blazing performance, in a cost-efficient manner, thereby driving a large reduction in TCO."

Each Schooner Appliance is built on a reliable, energy-efficient IBM System x Server, and comes with multi-core Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ processors, 512 GB or 1024 GB of Schooner-optimized flash memory, 64 GB or 128 GB of DRAM, and high-speed 1/10-Gb Ethernet interconnect technology. Customers may buy directly from Schooner in the U.S. and Canada or from IBM worldwide.