Today, VMware announced the purchase of Continuent , a software company that delivers replication , high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to databases. According to the following VMware blog this software will be utilized first in VMware’s Hybrid cloud platform “vCloud Air” to deliver DBaaS capabilities to it’s customers.
The Continuent software has some very impressive features, by abstracting the database from the application using it’s Continuent Tungsten connector, Continuent can replicate the data between two disperse databases and fail over the database with out disruption to the application.
Clik here to view.
Continuent architecture
But that’s not all, the software can also deliver heterogeneous database replication of Oracle to Oracle, Oracle to My SQL, and Oracle and MY SQL to Hadoop.
The following is taken from the Continuent site where we can see a wide range of benefits this software delivers:
- Database-as-a-Service – Continuent Tungsten provides data services (database clusters, or cluster of database clusters) equally well in any bare-metal, private cloud (VMware, Open Stack) and public cloud (Amazon AWS, Red Hat OpenShift) environments
- Zero-Downtime – Perform database maintenance, such as schema changes, upgrades to a new version of MySQL or adding new hardware, without application or service interruptions
- Automatic Failover – Continuent Tungsten can replace a failed master DBMS server within seconds while maintaining continuous availability and without losing any transactions
- Multi-Master, Multi-Site – Manage databases across different physical locations, both on-premises and in the cloud. Continuent Tungsten maintains real-time updates and failure handling for distributed operations
- Disaster Recovery (DR) – Switch to a hot-standby disaster recovery site running a Continuent Tungsten cluster with a single command without losing application connectivity
- Oracle Replication – Replicate data from Oracle to MySQL, from MySQL to Oracle, and from Oracle to Oracle. Think “Oracle GoldenGate without the price tag!”
- Replication to Real-time Analytics and Big Data – Continuent Tungsten enables replication quickly and efficiently to high-performance NoSQL and data analytics engines. Continuent Tungsten and Tungsten Replicator can publish data in real-time from RDBMS to MongoDB, Hadoop, and Vertica
- Load Balancing – Continuent Tungsten increases throughput by automatically and transparently load balancing read operations across multiple slaves
- Improved Performance – Continuent Tungsten improves database performance by transparently splitting reads to the slaves and writes to the master, thus reducing the master load. Continuent Tungsten can increase replication performance by five (5) times over native MySQL and increases transaction volumes using intelligent parallel methods
- Supports MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server – Continuent Tungsten supports MySQL, MySQL Community and Enterprise versions (5.0 to 5.6), MariaDB (5.5) and Percona Server (5.5 and 5.6) without changes. No software upgrade or data migration is necessary for a Continuent Tungsten implementation in an existing production environment. In addition, no application or DDL changes are required to support live heterogeneous replication
This is a very strong play to bolster the capabilities of vCloud air and the DBaaS offering of VMware.
As a big DBaaS proponent I am very pleased by this latest buy and will keep updating on developments.
Niran