Helping Companies Adapt To the Future: nuoDB

Databases are the heart of any major corporation. Companies need a reliable database to keep track of their employee details, corporate information, and client data to carry out their day-to-day operations efficiently. As a company grows in size and scale, its database becomes increasingly complex and requires a dedicated staff to administrate and handle all the maintenance. Cloud computing has changed the face of database management and software services. Corporations no longer need to maintain a cumbersome server and the rack on premises and can shift their information load to the cloud. It saves time, space, expenditure to hire a dedicated staff and most of all, is secure and convenient.

nuoDB is a database company based in Massachusetts that has developed an elastic SQL database. Traditional relational databases were designed for a client-server era, not the distributed, cloud- and the container-based environment we see now. Even so-called “cloud” relational databases are either just traditional database hosted in the cloud or built on traditional database architectures. Unlike these monolithic architectures, nuoDB’s patented, distributed approach to database architecture delivers the cost savings, availability, and on-demand scale driving this change while keeping the rich SQL interface and strict transactional consistency databases of record demand.

Differentiating From the Rest

The past decade has ushered in an explosion in innovation as organizations sought to harness the agility and elasticity of the cloud. Yet the poster child of that innovation - NoSQL - did so by abandoning the simplicity, rigor, and reliability of traditional relational databases. As software companies increasingly turn to either containers or public, private, or hybrid cloud deployments to support their growing, global - and increasingly mobile - customer base, they need a database that can support today’s cloud-based, on-demand economy without sacrificing the guarantees that old guard of relational database provide. Only nuoDB meets all these demands – plus much more – with a single, logical database running across computers within or across multiple data centers.

First envisioned by industry-renowned database architect and innovator Jim Starkey in 2008, nuoDB was launched in 2010 by Starkey and enterprise software executive Barry Morris. Fundamental to the founders’ vision was the idea of developing a database that builds on the power of SQL to move relational technology beyond the traditional monolithic databases designed 30 years ago. Today, that vision has re-defined relational database technology to tackle the multiple challenges associated with cloud computing and the rise of global application deployments.

With its deep roots in database innovation, nuoDB is singularly focused on delivering a smarter database that can easily adapt to the emerging requirements of software organizations as they transform their successful on-premises models to accommodate the services-based cloud applications their customers now demand. nuoDB combines the scale-out simplicity, elasticity, and continuous availability that hybrid cloud applications require, with the transactional consistency and durability that databases of record demand.

nuoDB’s architecture was designed with five major requirements in consideration:

• Scaling-out with the addition of more computers to facilitate better accommodation when computers are added or removed. The elastic scalability made possible by nuoDB’s peer-to-peer architecture makes scaling about as easy as adding a node. As the new machine is added, its resources are made available to share the workload. When transaction volume decreases, resources can be easily shed from the database to conserve costs and improve utilization.
• Never needing to be shut down, nuoDB automates redundancy to ensure that when processes, hosts, even whole data centers fail or are taken down that database availability is not impacted and strict consistency is maintained. The affected workload merely gets reabsorbed by the rest of the available (and still running) processes.
• High tolerance for hardware and software faults
• Multi-site operations for business continuity by providing redundancy
• Automatic load balancing
• nuoDB natively supports active-active deployment - both read and write workloads - across up to three data centers and even across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. This capability (which varies based on latency and workload requirements) improves customer performance and ensures cloud vendor independence.

Innovative Architecture

nuoDB’s distributed database appears as a single, logical SQL database to the application, making it easy for you to develop against. Unlike traditional monolithic databases, however, nuoDB separates - and can independently scale - transaction processing and storage management. This two-layer, peer-to-peer architecture retains strict transactional consistency and can be deployed across multiple data centers (even different clouds!) and is optimized for in-memory speeds, continuous availability, and elastic scale-out.

Meet the Pioneering CEO of nuoDB, Bob Walmsley

Bob Walmsley is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company and growing the business. He focuses on aligning business and technology needs to ensure resources and investments are directed at delivering customer success. With over 25 years of industry experience, Bob has a track record of building high performing teams and driving operational scalability at rapidly growing software companies. Until recently he was the executive vice president of Sales and Services at nuoDB, responsible for growing and nurturing its customer portfolio.

Bob provides a wealth of domain expertise in the enterprise software industry, from companies such as Object Design, a leading object database company and Iona Technologies, the leading distributed middleware company in Ireland.

“Our mission is to build a database to power - and empower - today’s business-critical cloud applications.”