ScaleArc Raises $12.3M To Make Databases Easier To Manage, Scale, And Guard Against Major Outages
ScaleArc has raised $12.3 million in a Series C round led by Accel Partners for its database infrasrtucture software. Trinity Ventures and Nexus Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total investment to $18.3 million.
ScaleArc gives visibility into an application’s database and helps solve the scaling issues that plague SaaS providers, web services, and any application deployment in the data center or the public cloud. Its software sits between the application and the actual database.
Once there, the software provides the following:
- A view of database traffic with granular real-time analytics of the SQL environment.
- Scalability and availability for databases with dynamic clustering, load balancing and sharding capabilities.
- An SQL-NoSQL hybrid caching engine, allowing for a NoSQL cache without any code changes or drivers.
Most valuable data is stored in SQL. To cache data in the database is a manual task that requires specific skills such as how to write the logic and then configure it.
ScaleArc automates and abstracts the complexity to give customers a deep view into the database. F5 has achieved success by offering this kind of networking capability. ScaleArc provides a visibility, for example, with Microsoft Sharepoint. ScaleArc caches Sharepoint content requests to not overload the database.
Customers get analytics to give a view of what should be cached and what should not. Analytics are actionable right out of the box.
ScaleArc is developing application templates to provide automatic caching without configuration. This would be useful with an application like WordPress.
ScaleArc has a core market in websites that need to scale or are having scaling issues. One SaaS client had two outages that cost it considerable revenue due to service level agreements that bound them to certain uptime requirements. ScaleArc makes the database issues more manageable.
The software is available as a virtual or turn-key appliance. It is “cloud ready” and can run on service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoGrid and Joyent. On AWS, it provides capabilities such as load balancing across servers and de-duplication across different geographies.
An emerging market for ScaleArc is the world of NoSQL databases. It has a custom SQL-NoSQL store for adding performance between the structured world of SQL and the unstructured dynamics of its NoSQL counterpart.
ScaleArc plans to support NoSQL as a backend database, much like it does with SQL. There are still lots of matters to resolve with NoSQL. For example, how is a peak load defined in a NoSQL database? How is this done in a geographic specific manner?
ScaleArc haS 37 employees and plans to expand to 60 by the end of the year.
ScaleArc competes with companies such as Citrix and Netscaler. The company has a big lead but the question is how can it keep that lead? NoSQL is the great frontier and there is sure to be competition in that fast emerging space.
Leave a Reply