SoftLayer is introducing a new product now that brings the open-source NoSQL database Riak to their cloud offerings.  The service makes for a pay-as-you-go Big Data service that is integrated into SoftLayer’s cloud infrastructure in a simplified turnkey solution.  This push of ready to deploy cloud services that integrate Big Data out of the box is rather unique.  Basho, the group behind Riak, and SoftLayer have teamed up to deliver on this product in an easy to configure product.  The market is filled with NoSQL storage options, but this integration right into the cloud offering is definitely a step ahead and perhaps a beacon for many cloud platforms in the future if it indeed sees great acceptance.  Needless to say, Riak itself boasts a great deal of solid enterprise features that begin but certainly do not end with high availability, robust reporting and stats, fault-tolerance, multi-tenancy, and great management features, which are no doubt integrated into the SoftLayer solution. 

Another thing that businesses like – is the ability to not only manage solutions, but to make deployment and design as easy as possible.  To those ends, the effort has developed a Web-based Solution Designer tool that makes designing a solution for their needs quite simplified.  The announcement from the two companies is sure to raise a significant amount of interest from the respective Big Data and cloud communities especially in light of the turnkey nature of the delivered product.

One question organizations will be asking is whether Riak itself is right for them.  Basho has done some great documentation on this as published on their wiki –

The NoSQL space, as well as the database space in general, is growing ever-crowded. Because of this, we often find ourselves answering very high-level questions from developers, prospects, and customers along the lines of, “How does Riak compare to this database?” or “What is the main difference between your replication strategy and this NoSQL Database?” So, we thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to make available very brief and objective comparisons to as many databases as possible. (The list below will be growing as soon as we have the time to grow it.)

As I mentioned, there are a good deal of NoSQL practices out there, but if a turnkey solution that has a great feature-set built into a cloud platform is something that works for you, you may want to check out SoftLayer.   The press release has more details.

SoftLayer & Basho Partner for High-Performance, Scalable Riak In The Cloud

 Turnkey Big Data Environments Available Across SoftLayer’s Global Infrastructure

Dallas, TX and Cambridge, MA — April 30, 2013 — Basho and SoftLayer Technologies today announced the availability of Riak and Riak Enterprise on SoftLayer’s global cloud platform. The integrated solution provides the availability, fault tolerance, operational simplicity, and scalability of Riak combined with the flexibility, performance, and agility of SoftLayer’s on-demand infrastructure.

SoftLayer and Basho have collaborated to make Riak—an open source, distributed database—deployment more accessible and flexible through a pay-as-you-go service model. This Riak hosting solution enables organizations to swiftly deploy scalable production-grade systems, accelerating the speed of deployment of big data applications and providing greater business agility. Organizations can design and deploy a complete big data hosting solution through SoftLayer’s Web-based Solution Designer, with ongoing management and provisioning available via the company’s portal, mobile apps and API.

Common use cases for Riak include fault-tolerant, low-latency storage for content, user and session information, mobile data, log files, JSON/XML documents, and more. For customers that require replication of clusters between multiple data centers, Riak Enterprise is available and also adds extended monitoring and 24×7 support. Customers use multi-datacenter replication, in two or more sites, to serve global traffic, maintain active backups, run secondary analytics clusters, or meet disaster recovery and regulatory compliance requirements.

“Customer demand for easy-to-deploy and manage big data cloud-based solutions continues to rise,” says Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer. “We are seeing substantial adoption through joint customers, such as Bump. Our platform was built specifically to support the kind of Web-scale distributed applications that big data exemplifies, and our partnership with Basho is further validation of our commitment to deliver a complete suite of scalable, high-performance big data solutions.”

“Basho and SoftLayer have long catered to innovative developers building the next generation of web, social and mobile applications. Today, enterprise customers are demanding the same, an architecture that provides for zero-data loss and delivers zero-downtime,” says Bobby Patrick, executive vice president and CMO of Basho. “We believe distributed systems software, such as Riak, and distributed infrastructure is required to help customers truly achieve these ambitions. Basho is excited to partner with SoftLayer to help companies easily deploy applications that are truly distributed, scalable, and always available.”

Bump is one of the most popular mobile apps on the market today. The app makes it easy for users to share their contact information, photos, and other objects by simply “bumping” their smartphones. Bump uses Riak to store user data including events, communications sent and received, handset information and authentication tokens.

“Operational ease is key to our business success,” says Mark Smith, Operations Lead at Bump. “The combination of SoftLayer, who we already trust with our business and data, and Basho, who makes the database that we trust at scale, saves us time and effort and allows us to focus on our business, not our data infrastructure.”

Features & Benefits

·       Web-based SoftLayer Solution Designer makes it easy to configure and deploy Riak environments on demand and at the click of a button.

·       High performance and superior availability and scalability leveraging the broadest cloud infrastructure platform in the industry including dedicated bare metal servers and a broad range of storage options.

·       Global private network allows for high-speed, secure replication between clusters

·       Optimized infrastructure and best-practice deployments based on joint insights, expertise, and experience from SoftLayer and Basho.

·       Pay-as-you-go model provides the flexibility of monthly or annual billing and no long-term contracts.