Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from Citrusleaf’s Brian Bulkowski. Citrusleaf is a database technology company. They offers a new type of NoSQL database based on the best practices of proven database and distributed technology. The company’s NoSQL database platform, Citrusleaf 2.0, solves a key problem that challenges today’s most data intensive, mission-critical businesses: how to optimally store and access terabytes of schema free data in real-time, with high throughput, ACID compliance, and 24×7 uptime.

More Information
Company Website: http://citrusleaf.com/
Tech Partner Marketplace: http://www.softlayer.com/marketplace/citrusleaf

Citrusleaf and SoftLayer: Taking NoSQL to the Next Level

Citrusleaf is the NoSQL OLTP (transaction-oriented) database behind some of the world’s largest advertising platforms. Our record of reliability and performance is the reason our customers choose us over any other database. We specialize in low-latency transactions on terabyte sized, billion-object databases. We fit well with analytics systems such as Hadoop or SQL-based “ETL” analytics architectures. Since Citrusleaf is fully reliable like a traditional database and has the speed of a cache, complexity is greatly reduced which leads to higher reliability and substantial cost savings.

Customers store actionable data for their internet applications on our platform. A typical use case is a server-side user data store. The advertising industry has moved to server-based user information storage as end users have become concerned about “tracking cookies” and other browser-side storage. Sophisticated advertising platforms are capable of associating users even after cookies have been cleared – through logins at partner sites, IP addresses and browser fingerprints. In the case where the user has elected not to be “tracked,” session management techniques allow “frequency capping” to limit the repetition of ads.

Citrusleaf’s clear strengths in the high-volume advertising use case can also be applied to other scenarios like online social gaming and internet scale applications. Our interface is simple: primary key lookups, an extension of the memcache interface with sophisticated eviction, document orientation, and database scanning. The result of the interface’s simplicity is that powerful applications can be written and maintained quickly and easily.

One of the keys to our technology is the rapid adoption of fast transactional storage. With a database that is capable of millions of transactions per second – 300,000 per node, and linearly scalable – configurations with SSD storage are the most cost efficient. Since SSDs can’t be provisioned on a minute-by-minute basis like traditional cloud infrastructure (the disks can take over 20 minutes to clear), SSDs fit well with a dedicated or managed hosting approach. SoftLayer has aggressively rolled out SSD capabilities in their data centers, and we work closely with them to source the most appropriate SSD models and vendors.

SoftLayer’s mixture of managed hosting, dedicated and cloud infrastructure in the same data center allows the rapid provisioning of database machines alongside the flexibility of a cloud system. That kind of flexibility and power is what we absolutely need to be successful, and we’re happy to have found it at SoftLayer.

If you’ve ever been interested to learn a little more about NoSQL and how it might reinvent the way you look at databases, visit http://citrusleaf.com to learn a little and let us know if you have any questions.

-Brian Bulkowski, Citrusleaf