Clustrix today emerged from stealth mode and announced the Clustrix CLX 4010, a highly scalable database solution that addresses the infrastructure scalability challenges facing Internet companies, enterprises, and cloud service providers.

The new appliance brings to database administrators the best of both worlds: the high-performance, high-scalability of NoSQL key value stores and the relational, ACID-compliant and robust functionality of SQL while providing drop-in interoperability with the MySQL protocol. The cost savings of utilizing the Clustrix solution are also significant – particularly when compared to the time and expense of application sharding (partitioning).

The Clustrix Clustered Database System consists of three or more identical CLX 4010 appliances, each running the Sierra Clustered Database Engine.

“We were an early Isilon investor and watched Paul Mikesell and the team builds massively scalable clustered file system technology, taking the company to more than a billion dollars in value,” said Greg McAdoo of Sequoia Capital. ”Based on such a positive experience, we could not pass up the opportunity to back Paul’s new company and take on an equal - if not even more impressive - opportunity with Clustrix.”

“As an investor in early-stage technology, I look for companies that can disrupt enormous markets,” said Don Listwin, Clustrix investor and board member. “Before Clustrix and its Clustered Database System, users could not achieve robust, Internet-scale, relational database functionality in a single-instance database.”

“Customers loved what we were doing for unstructured data and file storage at Isilon, but I kept hearing about how incredibly painful, risky and expensive scaling their databases was,” said Paul Mikesell, founder and CEO of Clustrix (pictured). “What they really want is something that provides them all the functionality they get in a single database, but that can handle the huge transactional workloads that their Internet-scale applications require without changing applications or architectures. That’s why we built a Clustered Database System that incrementally scales to hundreds of nodes as a single-instance database, has fully relational functionality, immediate transactional consistency, and deploys seamlessly.”

The Clustrix solution is based on the Sierra Clustered Database Engine, a shared-nothing execution environment that includes the Sierra Parallel Planner and the Sierra Distributed Execution Engine. This unique distributed and parallel architecture is highly efficient and brings the query to the data, rather than the data to the query. The Clustrix Clustered Database executes one query with maximum parallelism and many simultaneous queries with maximum concurrency. This results in high scalability, high read/write workload performance, high-availability, online schema changes, self-healing, and self-management. The system also provides drop-in MySQL protocol compatibility, so no application porting is necessary for seamless deployment.

Scaling the database is as simple as adding one or more additional CLX 4000 Series appliances to a rack, connecting the ports, assigning IP addresses, and clicking the Expand button. CLX 4010 appliances deploy in a totally transparent and non-disruptive manner into unsharded, sharded and replicated MySQL environments. As customers need to add more CLX 4010 nodes, the distributed and parallel architecture automatically distributes data to new nodes and scales performance linearly even under heavy write loads. The CLX solution provides high availability via automated load balancing, failover, recovery, and self-healing.