Aerospike, a NoSQL database provider, has just earned some more bragging rights.  Thumbtack released a new report today titled “Failover Characteristics of Several Leading NoSQL Databases”. The paper is the follow-up to a January benchmark that found Aerospike’s offering performs up to 10 times better than competing solutions.

This latest study compares how Cassandra, Couchbase, MongoDB and Aerospike handle node failure. The tests were carried in a four-server cluster environment that received a load of 50 million records, each 120 bytes in size, from eight client machines.

For each test the cluster ran the workload (which consisted of 50 percent writes and 50 percent updates) for 10 minutes before a node was terminated using a kill command. Each time the process was brought back online after 10 minutes, and researchers monitored the cluster for another 20. They examined both asynchronous and synchronous replication performance.

Couchbase could not run in synchronous replication mode, a finding that was also noted in the original study. It did, however, recover almost instantaneously in asynchronous mode, just like MongoDB and Aerospike. Cassandra took up to 20 seconds to recover.

After recovery, all the databases, with the exception of MongoDB, started serving requests almost immediately. The latter only started running normally after a 30 second delay.

Another notable result is that Aerospike was the only database that managed synchronous replication with only 2 nodes, which means TCO can be up to 33 percent higher for users of alternative solutions.

Aerospike is one of many solution providers in the emerging NoSQL space, which is picking up steam.  NoSQL was a hot topic at Strata this year, considering the growing number of Hadoop distos hitting a rather crowded market.  Several players including Rackspace are arming their portfolios with NoSQL services, through acquisitions or product updates.

Besides releasing this new benchmark, Aerospike announced that Roger Sippl signed up as an advisor to the company. Sipp is the original founder and CEO of Informix Software, an early leader in the relational database segment that was eventually acquired by IBM. He’s the current head of Sippl Investments, a Silicon Valley VC.

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