MariaDB Launches Innovation Labs to Explore and Conquer New Frontiers

MariaDB Labs Inaugural Initiative is Collaborative Effort With Intel to Implement Reference Architecture for Databases on Distributed Storage and Computing

NEW YORK – MariaDB M|18 User Conference – Feb. 26, 2018 – MariaDB® Corporation, the company behind the fastest growing open source database, today announced the creation of MariaDB Labs, a research division that tackles the most extreme challenges in the database field. Aimed at pioneering breakthroughs, MariaDB Labs will bring together world-class experts and industry leaders to make discoveries that spawn new use cases. For its inaugural initiative, MariaDB Labs will collaborate with Intel to implement a reference architecture for databases with disaggregated memory and storage in modern data centers.

“Geo-distributed applications, non-volatile memory, predictive optimizers and self-driving databases are the new inflection points in this era of modern data computing,” said Michael Howard, CEO, MariaDB Corporation, “With MariaDB Labs, we want to recharge the conversation and inspire new research in solving these challenges. The first initiative under this goal is our collaboration with Intel on a new reference architecture and implementation based on distributed storage using high-performance fabrics.”

MariaDB Labs is focused on three fundamental areas of research, including:

  • Machine learning to transform the ways in which MariaDB is deployed and managed in public and private clouds, and employ learning methods for database self-configuration and self-optimization.
  • Distributed computing to break through long-held beliefs in relational technology and compromises in NoSQL, raising the bar for web-scale, geo-distributed deployments and executing on new approaches for one of the industry’s most difficult to solve problems.
  • Next-generation chips, memory and storage to radically change the infrastructure on which databases run, advancing performance, high availability, costs and energy conservation.

“Traditional databases are facing new and challenging requirements emerging from cross-platform cloud deployments to elastic scale-out to global demands for high availability, to name a few,” said Roger Bamford, Board Advisor, MariaDB Labs. “Solving for these will be difficult and is truly groundbreaking work. The impact will be significant, not only to remove barriers but to open the door for new opportunities and use cases.”

MariaDB Labs and Intel Innovate on Cloud-Centric Shared Storage Architecture

As businesses become more data intensive, cost per transaction is an important metric in keeping costs in line. At the same time, companies are increasingly looking to cut ties with proprietary solutions in favor of cloud-friendly, open source platforms that can be readily integrated into data environments. For the inaugural MariaDB Labs initiative, Intel and MariaDB are collaborating on a truly innovative open source database using a disaggregated cloud-centric storage architecture. The research will specifically examine the use of shared, log-structured storage to support the persistence requirements of distributed databases, bringing fast recovery and cloning through an automated recovery process.

In addition, this new reference architecture extends the MyRocks storage engine in MariaDB, optimized for solid state drives (SSDs) for better compression, faster replication and data loading. The architecture is designed with the Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform, Intel® Optane™ SSDs and Intel Persistent Memory. MariaDB expects customers will see increased performance, increased scale per server and support for bigger, more affordable data sets.

“Our research collaboration with MariaDB will focus on an innovative distributed log architecture using Intel Optane SSDs and Intel Persistent Memory woven together through high-performance fabrics,” said Alper Ilkbahar, Intel Vice President, Data Center Group General Manager, Datacenter Memory and Storage Solutions. “Our shared goal is to enable faster recovery and cloning, increase overall performance and resilience, and reduce solution TCO from today’s level.”

Intel will discuss the details of this approach and early results during MariaDB’s M|18 user conference in a session titled “Intel and MariaDB: Strategic collaboration to enhance MariaDB functionality, performance and TCO.”

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About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB Corporation is the company behind MariaDB, the fastest growing open source database. MariaDB, with a strong history of community innovation and enterprise adoption, provides the most functionally complete open source database. MariaDB powers applications at companies including Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities and more.

MariaDB solutions are engineered to run on any infrastructure – bare metal servers, virtual machines, containers, public and private clouds – and is available in all leading Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, and is the default database in openSUSE, Manjaro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) / CentOS / Fedora, Arch Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Debian, with a reach of more than 60 million developers worldwide.

 

Intel, Xeon, and Optane are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.