Achieving Scale and Performance in the Cloud

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Wiqar Chaudry.

New breakthroughs in cloud-based data management empower databases with the necessary elasticity they need to be truly responsive to the ebbs and tides of supply and demand. Cloud computing allows all capital assets – computing power, memory and storage for example – to be exchanged at the best price, giving everyone the best value for their money. Like any free market, it will only deliver its full benefits to buyers and sellers if the right conditions are available. There can be no barriers to entry, and assets in the cloud must be capable of free movement.

Unfortunately, the unsuitability of traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) has created such a blockage. Their lack of elasticity or liquidity demobilizes computing resources. However, new developments in cloud database technology (like database bursting and hibernating functions) show how the database component can have the necessary fluidity to bring cloud-computing closer to ‘perfect market’ conditions and begin to deliver its full benefits…

Consider the empirical evidence of how the fluidity of assets is changing. The limitations of a traditional relational database (RDB) meant that it ran on its own server. By contrast, in March 2013 HP demonstrated how 72,000 databases were able to share a single HP Moonshot server. Not only could they co-exist, they were able to ramp up and wind down their use of the computing capacity, so that trade-offs of processing power, storage and memory could be made as their own supply and demand changed…

Read more from the source @ http://www.sys-con.com/node/2648245/print