SchoonerSQL Automates Failure Handling & Failover

There are different types of failures in the database environment ranging from the loss of the network, to the loss of an instance, all the way to the loss of a node (the server hardware). A robust database is one that can detect such failures and automate the failover and recovery process without any user intervention.

SchoonerSQL does exactly that: it detects failures and provides an immediate and automated failover process.

Below are the failover scenarios and how SchoonerSQL will handle them.

Instance Failure

Consider three instances in a synchronous replication group where Node 1 has the master instance, and Node 2 and Node 3 have slave instances.

The master has one write virtual IP (10.1.1.2) and one read virtual IP (10.1.1.3); slave instances have read virtual IPs (10.1.1.4, 10.1.1.5) as shown in the diagram below.

When a master instance fails due to a crash or a shutdown, the failure handler will immediately detect it and migrate all the virtual IPs from the failed instance to Node 2 & Node 3. The entire process is generally quick with an average failover time of 3 to 5 seconds.

Clients automatically connect to the surviving node and continue running the queries. The entire operation is transparent to the end-user.

SchoonerSQL also possess self-healing capability with an auto restart when a crash happens. The instance will rejoin the cluster once it catches up and is in sync (virtual IPs will be re-distributed to this instance automatically when it joins the group). 

Node Failure

The failure handler detects when the entire node crashes or shuts down. Virtual IPs will then be migrated from the failed node to the instances on the remaining live nodes in the cluster.

Replication Network Failure

Consider two instances, one acting as master with write, read virtual IPs and the other acting as slave with read virtual IP.

Consider a scenario where the replication network fails causing network partitioning. The failure handler immediately detects this and shuts down the slave. The virtual IP of the slave is then migrated over to the master as shown in the diagram.

To conclude, SchoonerSQL not only detects failures but also automates the failover process thereby providing users a seamless and a transparent experience.

Two Schooner webinars next week (April 25th, 26th)

Register for this webinar "Replication, Read-Consistent Slaves & Redundancy" where we'll discuss various replication solutions and explain why SchoonerSQL offers the best synchronous replication solution. The webinar will also cover performance benchmarks and how read-consistent slaves (redundant database nodes) can help your application stay online 24x7, providing 99.999% availability. 

Replication, Read-Consistent Slaves & Redundancy

Thursday, April 26, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
Webinar link
http://info.schoonerinfotech.com/ReadConsistentSlavesWebinar

There is also another webinar on how you can "Free your Data and Budget".  This is a business discussion aimed at helping IT decision makers make better choices to protect their buying power, while lowering the overall license and support costs associated with maintaining their IT data centers. Before you default to your existing high availability database vendor for your next new deployment, listen to this webinar. 

Free your Data, Free your Budget: New Choices in the Enterprise Database Market  

Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET

Webinar Link

http://info.schoonerinfotech.com/FreeYourDataWebinar

20 Real-World Use Cases to help pick a better MySQL replication scheme

Darpan Dinker (VP of Engineering at Schooner) presented a talk on "MySQL Replication Pros-Cons: Which replication mechanism to choose and why" at Percona Live conference last week. The presentation focused on

• Achieving Higher Performance
• Uptime
• Reliability
• And Simplicity for Real-World Use Cases. 

Presentation slides can be viewed in the link below
http://www.slideshare.net/darpandinker/schoonersql-perconalive2012

Schooner Welcomes Percona’s Entry into the High-Availability MySQL Market

Schooner announced initial benchmarks of SchoonerSQL™ against the new Percona XtraDB Cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster is a distribution of Percona Server with the Galera HA toolkit.

Standard benchmarks are a proxy for the performance that users may see with their own workloads. Schooner ran the standard DBT2 benchmark, which is the open-source OLTP version of the TPC-C benchmark, using a heavy workload of 1,000 warehouses with 32 concurrent connections to the database and zero think time. Measurements in each case were made using a typical two-node master-slave configuration. Each node was a standard IBM x86 server with 12/24 processor cores/threads, 72 GB of DRAM, and two 320 GB Fusion-io ioDriveDuos, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2. 

SchoonerSQL Delivers Three Times the Throughput of New Percona XtraDB Cluster, with 1/4th the Response Time and Half the Total Cost of Ownership

Press Release Link

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/company/press-releases/2012/20120410_PerconaCluster.php

Plaxo picks SchoonerSQL over Oracle

World’s leading online address book, Plaxo, deploys SchoonerSQL instead of Oracle database.

Watch this on-demand webinar where Ethan Erchinger, VP of Operations and Solution

Architecture at Plaxo, talks about the CIO challenge he faced and why he chose to deploy

SchoonerSQL instead of Oracle.

Also hear how SchoonerSQL offers IT decision makers an alternative that delivers both high

performance and high availability at a lower license cost than status-quo solutions.

http://info.schoonerinfotech.com/MBPSSTP_OND.html?at=Recorded-Webinar&an=M-T3S-StopTradingPerformance

SchoonerSQL at Percona Live Conference 2012 – Booth #201

Come see Schooner at Percona Live Conference (Booth #201) and learn about SchoonerSQL’s approach to both sync and async replication with parallel appliers. Tired of stale or lagging data in MySQL? Learn how you can achieve data consistency and eliminate slave lag with SchoonerSQL while maintaining 100% compatibility with standard MySQL.

Zero changes required for your application if you have already deployed on MySQL. Visit the Schooner booth to learn more.

Experience a live GUI demo at the booth that will illustrate SchoonerSQL features in a real-world, hands-on format:

• Instance provisioning and cluster management & monitoring via the Schooner Administrator (GUI)
• Fault detection and automated failover within a LAN and across the WAN
• Configuration of synchronous and asynchronous replication clusters
• Online backup and restore
• Event-driven e-mail alerts

Attend the Live Session “MySQL Replication: Pros and Cons”

Time: Thursday, April 12^th @11:00 - 11:50

Location: Ballroom H

Speaker: Darpan Dinker, VP of Engineering

• The use of synchronous replication in InnoDB to eliminate data loss and to provide cluster-wide data consistency
• The use of parallelism and granular concurrency control with synchronous replication to fully exploit commodity servers and storage to maximize performance, resulting in huge datacenter consolidation
• Extending base synchronous clusters with tightly coupled, parallel asynchronous replication to achieve auto-failover and consistency across geographically dispersed data centers

http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/sessions/mysql-replication-pros-and-cons

Two Schooner Webinars this week- HA and Membrain 4.0

Best Practices #2: Stop Trading Performance for High Availability
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
Webinar Details

Organizations need both high performance and high availability to remain competitive in today's 24x7 online economy. Please join us in this business discussion to learn how new technologies are, for the first time, offering IT decision makers an alternative that delivers both high performance and high availability, at a lower cost than status-quo solutions.

Register here
http://info.schoonerinfotech.com/MBPSSTP_REG.html?at=Live-Webinar&an=M-BPS-StopTradingPerformance

How to Get Lightning-Fast Performance with Membrain 4.0 and Fusion-io
Thursday, March 22nd, 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET 
Webinar Details 

Join this discussion on the latest release of Schooner Membrain (version 4.0) and how pairing it with Fusion-io ioMemory results in DRAM-like performance with the persistence of flash, providing a low-latency solution that accelerates database performance, reduces painful sharing and drives business value through increased server utilization.

Register here
http://info.schoonerinfotech.com/MT3SLFP_REG.html?at=Live-Webinar&an=M-T3S-LightningFastPerformance 

One SchoonerSQL node provides more throughput than nine Clustrix nodes – Part 2

The Schooner performance team completed a report that documents a TPCC-mysql benchmark run at the scale of 5000 warehouses (about 500GB) to observe stability at high levels of throughput. The impetus for this run was a Clustrix (a Flash-memory storage based database appliance) report documenting the solution’s stability and scalability at 3, 6 and 9 cluster nodes using the same benchmark and at the same scale.

SchoonerSQL executed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server v6.2 installed on a commodity Dell server fitted with Fusion ioDriveDuo based Flash memory and the same amount of DRAM as 3 nodes of Clustrix (144GB).

The comprehensive report provides the following details (such that the results can be reproduced):

 

·      Charts that plot throughput and response time over the period of the run

·      Hardware profile output

·      InnoDB configuration for consistency, durability and sizing

·      MySQL show variables output

·      Layout of database related files on hard-drive and Flash memory

·      MySQL configuration (my.cnf) for SchoonerSQL

·      Exact output from the benchmark driver program

In direct comparison with Clustrix results, one SchoonerSQL node executed higher throughput than 9 nodes of Clustrix.

The SchoonerSQL report can be found at

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/products/schoonersql/index.php#Benchmarks

One SchoonerSQL node provides more throughput than nine Clustrix nodes – Part 1

http://schoonerha.blogspot.com/2012/02/one-schoonersql-node-more-throughput-than-9-clustrix-nodes.html

Schooner Membrain™ 4.0 is released

Schooner’s rapid enhancements and continuous development has resulted in the release of Membrain 4.0. It is now generally available and can be deployed in production environments.

Membrain 4.0 highlights:

• Increase from 512 GB to 1 TB (1024 GB) in the amount of flash memory supported on each x86 server
• Full-featured graphical user interface (GUI) for easier management and monitoring of the Membrain instances 
• Support for monitoring instances of stock memcached, which are often used in conjunction with flash-optimized Membrain 
• Upgraded installer 
• Upgraded remote diagnostics tool 
• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 and CentOS 6.2

Read the press release                                                                                

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/company/press-releases/2012/20120313_Membrain40.php

As this is my first blog post on Membrain, let me give you a brief overview on the technology and its benefits.

Brief Overview

Memcache is a distributed memory caching system that is widely used to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. But there are several limitations-

• Data is not persistent (cached data is lost if memcache server goes down)
• No replication or failover mechanism
• Cached data is limited to the memory available (in most cases 64GB)
• No effective monitoring, management GUI tool with backup utility

But Schooner Membrain addresses all of the above issues. It is a flash optimized multi-threaded key-vale store providing high performance coupled with synchronous replication and persistent caching.

Membrain is based on the standard memcached protocol and API, which is 100% compatible.

Integrating Schooner Membrain into your Memcached environment is simply a matter of adding the Schooner’s network interfaces to the configuration files of your Memcached clients. No need to alter your application client code unless you require data persistence.

Membrain server can be used as a standard cache or backend storage medium.One can turn off the persistence if they require just a standard cache.

Membrain Benefits

Persistent Data Store

Schooner Membrain provides the ability for users to store the cached data on either fusion IO or any other PCI-e based flash memory or SSD for persistence. Data is safe even if there is a power outage.

High Availability

It provides high availability through synchronous replication and auto failover. Two Membrain servers can be configured as a mirrored pair, in which data to one server are replicated to the other. If one server in the pair goes down, the other transparently assumes its VIPs and serves its clients.

Containers

Membrain supports the creation of multiple virtual storage domains called “containers” to provide fine-grained control over cached resources.

Containers provide isolation and policy control, yet efficiently share processor, DRAM, and flash resources. It can support up to 128 dynamic containers.

Protects against Data Corruption or Data Loss

Many applications need to back up the contents of key-value store to recover from user errors or application-driven data corruption. Membrain supports full and incremental backup and restore of persistent containers to hard disk drives.

Robust GUI

Membrain includes an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) that allows all aspects of configuration, monitoring, management and maintenance that can be performed with intuitive screens and menus.

Huge Consolidation

Membrain can consolidate large number of nodes to fewer nodes.

For example, an application may require a total of 1 TB of memory to achieve a targeted hit rate. If a typical Memcached server has 64 GB of DRAM, this application would require 16 nodes to get the required capacity. Spreading the client workload across 16 nodes results in poor processor and network utilization (<10%). With Membrain one can have the entire working set of the application to be hosted on a single node, enabling balanced use of processor and networking resources leading to huge consolidation.

Download Schooner Membrain white paper below to know more details

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/resources/index.php

Schooner becomes an Ispirer Systems partner to enable seamless database migration to SchoonerSQL

Organizations have begun to realize the value of moving from expensive database vendors to Schooner, reaping enterprise functionality at a fraction of the cost.

To better enable these migrations, Schooner and Ispirer have partnered to ensure smooth, seamless database migration to SchoonerSQL, an enterprise-grade SQL database delivering 99.999% uptime at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. SchoonerSQL is 100% compatible with MySQL, for easy adoption.

SQLWays is a popular tool offered by Ispirer to convert stored procedures, functions, triggers, database schema (DDL) and data from Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB to SchoonerSQL.

This partnership will help Schooner reach more enterprise customers and offer them an easy path to migrate from high cost databases to SchoonerSQL.

Press Release

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/company/press-releases/2012/20120306_IspirerPartnership.php

Migration Services

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/downloads/datasheets/Schooner_Ispirer_Migration_Services.pdf