Cybersite Consulting offers a range of services that relate to the database clustering and each solution area will be specific to the needs of the client. The term "cluster" is often both over-used and mis-used in computer terms and can refer to a specific architecture, program types and specific database features. Below you will see some of the solutions that are offered to help you get the most effective return on your investment.

MySQL AB offers a cluster solution called "MySQL Cluster" which uses the NDB engine for offering synchronous data access and updates. This solution offers an architecture that is inherently high-availability as having many data nodes means that the data is reliable and if a small percentage of the ndoes goes down, the rest of the cluster will keep working with the total dataset still available.

The MySQL Cluster solution is currently based on in-memory storage and calculations with a log-based storage and backup system to provide 100% safety to data with high speed access. The number of data nodes can vary from 2 upwards, but most clusters will be fine with between 2 and 8 data nodes.

Where would you use the MySQL Cluster in real world applications? It is currently being used (and was originally designed for) in telecoms business to track phone calls and number lookups. Other situations where it would perform well is areas of high-transaction on smaller datasets, so areas such as sign-on and authentication systems, security event logs, SCADA subsets etc. Could all benefit from the MySQL Cluster architecture.

MySQL can also be setup in a cluster-style architecture using the asynchronous capabilities of replication. The replication offers a number of flexible architectures that can be utilised to offer higher throughput and increased reliability of the data store. This becomes a viable solution if you have predominantly read-only data and/or your data size is too large to manage easily within memory constraints of the hardware under MySQL NDB Cluster.

The replication setups can be used effectively in areas such as archives based on news, web pages, articles, books etc, log archives and datawarehouse solutions. The main point for this to work effectively is predominantly read-only data, but even with higher write transactions there are effective solutions that Cybersite can setup to suit your needs.

Cybersite Consulting has partnered with Dolphin Interconnect Solutions to provide a high-performance solution for MySQL NDB Cluster. Quite often the addition of many nodes to a cluster causes congestion on the network due to latency and the tcp/ip processing required to talk between all the nodes. The Dolphin SCI connection enables the nodes to be connected together on a fast interconnect bus between each of the nodes to allow sharing between the nodes. The tcp/ip stack latency is removed by replacing tcp/ip with a customised,open-source socket implementation of tcp that can be used as a simple dropin replacement. This allows the socket to function effectively, but on the chance it does fail, the SCI bus connection fails back to the default tcp/ip stack connection.

If you are interested in see results of using the Dolphin SCI cards and/or would like to purchase some, please contact us for a quote.