How Enterprising Are You?

Enterprise software has a tough task: deliver compelling features and functions while meeting production grade service levels. Our job is to bring you the innovations of MariaDB packaged in a form that inspires confidence. Thats what MariaDB Enterprise is all about, and we’re excited to bring you a new edition of our flagship product.

Challenge

Open source is a powerful innovation driver. Case in point: MariaDB, a superior implementation of the world’s most widely adopted database technology. But what to do when you are trying to create something new, and need a database that can step up? MariaDB Enterprise is our advanced distribution of MariaDB that adds just what you need for the most challenging projects. To MariaDB itself, we add:

• Curated binaries, hardened and tested for stability.
• New supported platforms to cost-effectively scale.
• Easy installation and configuration to get you up and running fast.
• Tools and partner products that extend MariaDB and simplify administration.
• Included services designed to save you time and money.
• Access to expertise and unique professional services only available from MariaDB Corporation.

If you’re doing something unusual, look to MariaDB Enterprise to reduce risk and expand your options – we’re up to the challenge!

Initiative

MariaDB Enterprise isn’t standing still. In the past months since the first release of the product in March, 2014, we’ve taken the initiative to add new capabilities to bring you even more value with your subscription.

Certified Binaries

The MariaDB project, and current community version releases embody the most cutting-edge new technology, along with the latest fixes and updates. It is great stuff but not always at “enterprise” grade. With our certified binaries, we’ve selected the stable, production ready features and tested and hardened the binary distributions of MariaDB Enterprise, and even backported some critical fixes from later community editions of MariaDB to MariaDB Enterprise to improve stability. One exciting update: MariaDB Enterprise now supports MariaDB 5.5 as well as MariaDB 10.0.

New Platforms

We’ve added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE to MariaDB Enterprise, with pre-built binaries for these OSs available for your use on the portal download page. And we’re adding support for a whole new architecture – IBM’s Power Systems with POWER8 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and coming soon SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SLES. We now support the most popular Linux distributions on two different hardware architectures, including POWER8, optimized for the most demanding interstellar web-scale deployments. Curious about just how much more scalable MariaDB on POWER8 is? Check out the benchmarks.

Notification Service

Crawling through lengthy change logs and diving into the issue tracker are thankfully in the past, with MariaDB Enterprise’s new Notification Service. Now, you can receive a customized report before every release detailing just how the release will affect you. And when we uncover security issues, you’ll be the first to know, with detailed advice and mitigations.

Easy, Safer Configuration

Our consultants have applied their decades of experience to fine-tune a new my.cnf file to optimize the default configuration of MariaDB Enterprise for common enterprise use cases. This new configuration file is built right into the binaries for MariaDB Enterprise – no need to download or install a thing.

MariaDB Enterprise now allows only stable and gamma quality add-ons to be activated by default. You can always configure experimental and beta add-ons at your own risk of course, but MariaDB Enterprise pre-installs only safe and stable components.

Helpful New Tools

Why should the MariaDB support and consulting team have all the fun? Now the same tools our experts use to diagnose and tune systems are included in MariaDB Enterprise along with a simple installer that brings these powerful tools to you with only a few keystrokes.

Better Downloads

We’ve simplified and streamlined the download process as well. Now, you can access all the software features of MariaDB Enterprise from your portal page. Less time, less complexity, more value.

We’re focused on making the decision to subscribe a no-brainer, by adding your most frequently requested new capabilities such as new platforms and a notification system, and smoothing the rough edges of a cutting edge open source database project with certified binaries, optimized configuration, and safe management of add-ons. Now that is initiative!

Business

If MariaDB Enterprise was just product and deployment benefits, as good as these features are, they wouldn’t be enough. Your business depends on the reliability, performance and flexibility of your data infrastructure. You need a partner committed to your success, and offering unique and differentiated professional services. MariaDB Corporation is just such a partner. We’re unique in the MySQL ecosystem.

Many of our support team, pre-sales engineering support, and professional consultants have been working on this technology for years. We know the “tricks of the trade” of how to scale, deploy and manage the database in the most complex environments, as Jetair, a large tour operator in Belgium found out.

Several of MySQL’s originators are actively working on MariaDB, and many contributors to the open source project work for us. We’ve got the inside track on the evolution and direction of MariaDB, and when you work with us, you too have that inside track, as Fusion-io discovered when they needed a partner to help them implement specialized optimizations for their advanced flash-memory storage systems.

We help you conform to the industry’s best practices and standards, because we originated many of them, based on hard-earned experience. Don’t take our word for it – find out what Greetz, a consumer web service, says.

We back you up with 24 x 7 x 365 support, and with professional services you can’t find elsewhere:

• Advanced consulting on architecture, deployment, and operational excellence.
• Engineering services, including custom code, tools, and upstream contributions so that MariaDB more closely fits your unique use cases.
• Training for your DBAs and developers to apply those tricks of the trade to your particular deployment.
• Remote DBA services that cover vacations and sick time for your critical personnel, and offer you iron-clad back-up for business continuity if that critical resource should leave your company.

Finally, and perhaps most important – we bring you leadership in the database world. Our company is singularly focused on delivering the finest database software on the planet, backed by some of the most skilled engineers and experts you can find anywhere. Very few companies can hope to duplicate this level of leadership, and doing so is a very expensive and long-term investment.

Rocket Science

(cue the theme from Star Trek) …

This latest edition of MariaDB Enterprise has some amazing new capabilities, but perhaps none as exciting as the new platforms on which we deliver certified binaries.

We told you earlier about how, working directly with IBM’s engineers, we’ve ported MariaDB to their advanced POWER8 systems. This was no easy feat, because MariaDB has been designed to work on little-endian architectures like Intel x86. POWER8, like most RISC architectures, is both little-endian AND big-endian at the same time. Individual code blocks can select whether they’re big-endian or little-endian, allowing sophisticated compiler optimizations and higher performance. But that means MariaDB must be implemented and tested to work both on big-endian and little-endian hardware.

MariaDB’s development engineers have the necessary knowledge of the database’s internals, as well as the comprehensive regression test suite that can validate a new implementation and its stability and correctness. These capabilities, unique with MariaDB Corporation, allowed us to port the database to this exciting new platform in record time, and the results speak for themselves – over double the per-core performance of MariaDB on POWER8 vs. on advanced Intel servers. With all this performance on a single cost-effective server, you can:

• reduce your power, floor-space and personnel costs,
• simplify your architecture with less replication,
• scale-up to massive data volumes and concurrent user capacities.

MariaDB performs so well on POWER8 that IBM is incorporating it as a foundational component of their Turbo LAMP stack – a tuned and optimized LAMP stack for the most advanced enterprise workloads.

We’re boldly taking MariaDB to where it has not been before – POWER8 architecture. You can join us on that voyage!

So, how enterprising are you? Become more enterprising, and leverage the software, subscription services, professional services, and expertise that only MariaDB Enterprise embodies. We’re here to bring you peace of mind and a rip-roaring powerful database infrastructure that can handle your toughest tasks. Your success is ours – and we treat your enterprise as our own. Check out our new version and work with our sales team to learn more!

Credit: Starship Enterprise model by burt45 – on MakerBot Thingiverse – CC-BY 3.0.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:102206