Aerospike Hyperscale Database: Product Overview and Insight

Products

Aerospike Database: The Aerospike next-generation NoSQL database is powered by a patented Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA) that’s proven in enterprises worldwide to fully leverage the power of modern hardware for hyperscale data-driven applications. By storing data on modern SSD devices with only indexes stored in high-performance DRAM, Aerospike’s HMA provides the high-performance advantages of a memory-based cache with the data consistency and persistence of modern SSDs. Aerospike’s HMA is a simpler and easier to maintain architecture that significantly reduces server sprawl and frees staff time to further develop new innovations. With self-healing clusters and high availability, Aerospike is virtually unbreakable, making it ideal for mission-critical use cases that require strict service-level agreements (SLAs) and extreme uptime.

Aerospike Cloud: On March 24, the company announced the debut of Aerospike Cloud, which empowers users to build, manage and automate their own Aerospike database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Aerospike Cloud is based on Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) standards, which enterprises are rapidly adopting to simplify the deployment, orchestration, management, alerting and monitoring of cloud applications across any public or private cloud environment. Aerospike Cloud will be available in the calendar-year Q2 2020.

The first release of Aerospike Cloud is optimized for workloads running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and includes the following features:

Kubernetes Operator: Custom Aerospike-specific extensions to the Kubernetes API that encapsulate operations domain knowledge, such as scale-up, scale-down, cluster configuration management and upgrades.

Helm Charts: Deploy Aerospike clusters in a Kubernetes environment using the Helm package manager, a CNCF incubating project.

Prometheus: Integration with the CNCF-graduated monitoring and alerting solution by way of a custom exporter for Aerospike Enterprise Edition and Alertmanager configs.

Grafana: Integration with CNCF member Grafana Labs’ open source visualization platform through custom dashboards for the Aerospike EE Prometheus exporter.

Key Features

• Strong Consistency: No data loss. Commit-to-device support for demanding correctness environments.
• Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR): Geographic replication of data by synchronizing data centers through high-performance replication.
• Multi-Tiered Storage Engine: Store data with traditional in-memory, unique Hybrid-Flash, or All-Flash storage architecture to optimize for performance and scale.
• Compression: Provides lossless compression of records written to persistent storage.
• Enterprise Reliability: Fast node restart, rapid rebalance for server upgrades or changes in minutes, and rack awareness to store data across hardware groups.
• Smart Client: Automatically distributes both data and traffic to all the nodes in a cluster. Automatic load balancing of the client improves both performance and correctness.
• Dynamic Cluster Management: Automatic storage and exchange of node information including changes and status with automated triggers for rebalancing.
• Change Notification: Inject change notifications into message queues, or insert them into other databases for reliable and scalable systems.
• Multi-Model: Easy-to-program data structures such as lists and maps improve performance and allow indexed lookups on field values.
• Enterprise Security: Full transport encryption. Support for encrypted storage and in-database transparent data encryption. Authentication, access control, and exception logging.

Aerospike Connect: The Aerospike Connect family of add-on modules makes it easier to integrate the Aerospike Database into both new and existing enterprise infrastructure systems. Aerospike Connect for Spark enables companies to directly integrate the Aerospike Database with their existing Spark infrastructure. In addition, Aerospike Connect for Spark allows companies to combine transactional and historical data stored in the Aerospike Database with streaming event data for consumption by machine learning and artificial intelligence engines using Apache Spark.

Services

Consulting Services: The Aerospike Consulting Services suite provides hands-on guidance to build scalable architectures for Aerospike. Delivered by experts with a deep understanding of the Aerospike Database and Aerospike Connect, Consulting Services takes a prescriptive approach to ensure a successful Aerospike deployment. The suite has a flexible and scalable model to address the specific needs of all enterprise deployments.

Insight and Analysis

From Gartner Peer Insights in a 2019 review by an experienced database administrator: Overall Comment: “Ultra low latency at scale within reasonable TCO and great support. The support from vendor (Aerospike) in responding to queries, whether technical or non-technical, has always been prompt and relevant at all times.”

What do you like most about the product or service? “The product is great and works as mentioned on the tin. The responses received from the Solution Architecture, Support Team as well as Commercial teams has been outstanding.”

What do you dislike most about the product or service? “The training aspects where the customer teams are trained could be made better. creating video and self pace learning tutorials would help more developers and support staff learn it faster. Some developers would love to see the SQL support for database. The Backup facilities could be further improved.”

What one piece of advice would you give other prospective customers? “There are many products out there, but choosing one among several dozen is extremely difficult so I have two suggestions: A) Be absolutely clear on the use-case and the core requirements you want any database product to address as well as understanding the priority order of the requirements. B) Look at the core competence/ Pedigree of the ‘Product’ when the product/company was created/formed; Almost all vendors extend their products/features overtime but the core aspects of the product are difficult to change it is this factor that will help you match the product with your requirements.”

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List of current customers: AT&T, Adobe, Airtel, Baidu, Banca D’Italia, Lexis Nexis, Neilsen, Neustar, PayPal, Snap, The Trade Desk, Verizon, Wayfair

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