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Continuent has announced the launch of its Tungsten scale-out stack. Continuent Tungsten is an open source stack for database scale-out through economical software and commodity hardware.

 

Tungsten provides database replication, group communications wrappers, performance testing tools and shared infrastructure which are needed for building workable scale-out solutions. It also includes sophisticated cluster management which is based on group communications. It can work with any database implementation and it available in source and binary forms.

 

Continuent’s Tungsten features basic failure protection as it maintains replicas of databases just in case the master database fails. It has automatic master failover by promoting one of the slaves as the master. The performance is enhanced as database replicas scale needs.

 

The cross-bite clustering feature maintains and replicates databases on multiple sites for disaster recovery and the heterogeneous data integration replicates from MySQL to Oracle (News - Alert) and the other way round. It populates a data warehouse by copying data from production database into a replica for purposes of reporting.

 

“The Tungsten stack is tremendously flexible. Gaining benefits requires solving a number of difficult scale-out issues. There is no ‘one-size fits all’ solution to database scale-out. You need to be able to flexibly combine and extend technologies to create workable solutions,” said Robert Hodges, CTO at Continuent.

 

The Tungsten stack allows mix-and-match of technologies according to any scale-out problem. Proxying is critical for some applications while they are considered performance drags by others. Tungsten users can use proxying or not depending on the problem they experience.

 

Matt Aslett, analyst with the 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, said that for an increase in adoption of open source databases at the enterprise application tier, several factors have to be considered. These include increased enterprise functionality, improved service and support offering, proof that performance fears are misplaced, increased resistance traditional database software licensing, and a move to Web-based architecture for internal applications.

 

Continuent Tungsten is an important database extension as it enables open source databases to support business critical solutions and also boosts performance. It allows customers to stay on Oracle database without using Enterprise licenses which may be expensive. Tungsten is capable of replicating from MySQL to Oracle and vice versa it offers new applications for open source databases in the enterprise application mix.

 

Continuent is a ScaleOut company which offers solutions for continuous high availability and incremental performance scaling using commodity hardware and databases. The company offers continuous uptime enabling delivery of business critical database applications with high data availability and accessibility. The Tungsten stack is open source and is independent of operating system and supports both commercial and open source databases like Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB.