An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Web load balancers that distribute traffic to multiple web servers are now mature and familiar, but database load balancers are not – in fact, they’re a new category that ScaleArc is trying to establish.
Existing enterprise database management systems offer clustering for high availability, but such clusters don’t work well in the cloud.
Instead, scaling databases in the cloud while maintaining ACID transactionality is a complex architectural challenge, and often involves sophisticated data sharding strategies for dividing up and distributing large databases. Furthermore, developers must write – or rewrite – applications to support sharding.
ScaleArc addresses all of these limitations with a full proxy load balancing layer that abstracts the database tier from the perspective of the application layer, and vice-versa.
It allows organizations to distribute enterprise databases (and database clusters) however they like across on-premises or cloud environments without requiring any code changes at the application layer or database changes in the persistence tier.
The end result: ‘consumer grade’ performance and scalability that users have come to expect from existing enterprise databases, as well as zero-downtime maintenance, hot backups, transparent caching, and other benefits.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
