Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a provider of data access appliances for information-intensive Web 2.0 and cloud computing data centers, says it emerged from "stealth mode" last week to move into the market with data access appliances in collaboration with IBM.
Schooner provides integrated data access appliances that are intended to reduce the high costs, complexity and efficiencies common in data centers: the Schooner Appliance for MySQL Enterprise and the Schooner Appliance for Memcached. Built on IBM System x server technology, Schooner's access appliances provide dynamic infrastructure solutions aim to offer more flexible, energy efficient and cost-effective IT solutions for businesses.
"In today's large scale-out architectures and deployments there's a requirement to have more and more machines, and racks and racks of servers which are consuming tons of power," Michael Pray, vice president of sales and marketing at Schooner, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "There's limited floor space, there's server after server, trying to handle this ever increasing mountains and mountains of data load."
Pointing to today's social networkers that are growing by leaps and bounds, for example, with increasing numbers of users requesting ever more data, Pray observes, "These companies are challenged with the requirement to deliver a service level to their users-fast response times-yet they are returning back more and more data. Some of these applications just get richer and richer," notes Pray. "Our company was founded upon trying to fundamentally readdress the notion of scale-out architectures and systems."
The Schooner data access appliances are intended to help customers meet the challenges of rapidly increasing data center costs, high rates of data growth and heightened business complexity with data access appliances that are scalable, smart, cost effective and green, according to Dr. John Busch, Schooner president, CEO, and co-founder. The appliances are built on a system architecture that integrates enterprise-class flash memory, Intel Nehalem multi-core processors, low-latency interconnect, and optimized data access and caching applications.
The scalable appliances provide businesses with improvements over traditional servers, including eight times higher performance, one-eighth the power and space requirements and significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO), according to the company. "We are a very strong TCO play. We save our customers up to 60% on a 3-year basis in TCO and we dramatically cut power, rack and pipe costs," states Pray.
Under the guidance of the IBM Venture Capital Group, Schooner partnered with the IBM System x group for server technology, co-branded sales and after-market support. Schooner appliances are currently in customer trials and will be available for volume shipment in the third quarter of 2009. For more information, go here.