News

10gen Offers MongoDB Cloud Subscription

• By John K. Waters
• December 3, 2012

Earlier this week 10gen, the creator and chief commercial sponsor of the open-source MongoDB NoSQL database, announced a new Cloud Subscription version of the database.

The new version will be available as an on-demand system engineered for the company's reseller partners. 10gen collaborated with cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer Technology to provide the first Cloud Subscription release. Its features include are optimized hardware and OS configurations, automated deployment of multi-data-center clusters, and integrated monitoring and support, according to the company.

First released in 2009, MongoDB is an open-source, document-oriented database written in C++. It's a leading example of a NoSQL database, the non-relational type of DB that has been emerging for the Web, the cloud and mobile computing. Google, Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn all have NoSQL databases. NoSQL DBs are distributed, schema-free, open-source nd horizontally scalable.

10gen has been selling commercial subscriptions for some time that provide production support and features not found in the open source code base, including higher-end enterprise security features and management systems integration, explained Jared Rosoff, director of product marketing for 10gen. But the Cloud Subscription adds a new wrinkle.

"This is sort of a hybrid approach between a complete DIY, where I build my own deployment infrastructure to run MongoDB, and something like a Database-as-a-Service that is completely abstracted from me," Rosoff told ADTmag. "It's also being offered as a pay-as-you-go subscription with no long-term contract."

The two companies worked closely on this release, Rosoff said, even to the point of engineering the hardware specifications according to 10gen's own best practices. SoftLayer has also created some MongoDB-specific features, including among others, a Web application that lets the user configure graphically a complex MongoDB deployment across multiple data centers, and which the SoftLayer system will automatically provision and configure through a self-service portal.

MongoDB gets its name either from the word "humungous" or from the massive Mongo character from the Blazing Saddles movie, depending on whom you ask. It's a popular database for Big Data deployments. SoftLayer's new MongoDB engineered systems come in several sizes, from entry-level quad-core servers to 16-core, high-performance computing nodes. These big data deployments may be fully integrated with other SoftLayer infrastructure solutions, the company says, with "secure intra-architecture and inter-data center connectivity via the company's global private network."

"We've taken the guesswork out of deploying and managing big data solutions with this unique subscription offering," said SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda, in a statement. "This is further validation of our commitment to deliver big data solutions that can run over our highly scalable, automated cloud platform."

MongoDB allows users to store JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, instead of the rows and columns of a relational database. According to 10gen, "It bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and scalable) and relational databases (which have rich functionality), which delivers a more scalable, high-performance, and cost-effective approach to data management than relational database technology." As the community puts it on the MongoDB website, "A non-relational approach is the best path to database solutions which scale horizontally to many machines."

The SoftLayer MongoDB solution is available now. More information is on the company's Web site here.