Customer Spotlight: Network Redux creates Seastar for managed database hosting

Network Redux provides enterprise-class web, application and data hosting services. The company has recently expanded their business to include a managed hosting offering specifically for Apache Cassandra.

The new service is called Seastar, and it is a data platform that allows customers to provision a new Cassandra cluster in minutes. The goal is to streamline database management so customers have more time to spend on data modeling and analysis instead of managing their infrastructure. Seastar includes a web dashboard and APIs to simplify the process.

In addition to on-demand provisioning, the Seastar service boasts better price-performance compared to running the same database on other commodity cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the company, Seastar is built on “dedicated, performance-tuned hardware using low-overhead container technology and the fastest solid state storage.” Customers not only get access to a world-class open source distributed database system; they are able to use it without having to build or manage an optimal environment themselves.

How it began

Seastar emerged from Redux Labs, an internally funded R&D entity within Network Redux with the goal of creating new services that run on top of their infrastructure. After doing many different custom hosting implementations for its customers, the company decided to build a platform tailored to the growing use of Apache Cassandra, which currently ranks as the eighth most-popular database in the world and rose from 10th to 8th position in db-engines rankings this year.

The amount of data continues to grow as a result of mobile device adoption, decreasing storage costs, IoT, and a trend towards businesses increasingly relying on data analytics for a competitive edge. As a result, Network Redux expects adoption of Apache Cassandra to increase in the coming years. As a NoSQL database that can accommodate massive, unstructured data sets and also scale horizontally to support additional growth, Apache Cassandra will become critical for efficient data analysis.

How does it work?

To develop Seastar, the company collaborated closely with its customers to create a service that would provide the best performance and value. The always-on service is designed to operate without interruption or downtime and is built using high-performance SSD storage. The platform includes automatic scaling capabilities, which are essential for data-intensive apps.

Infrastructure elements

Network Redux uses redundant, highly available colocation and IP services from Internap to build a high-performance environment for its customers. The company consolidated its infrastructure into Internap’s Seattle data center in 2010. In preparation for the launch of Seastar early next year, Network Redux will expand into Internap’s New York metro data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, giving the company a cross-country presence with geographic proximity to Amazon’s East and West regions with 5-7 millisecond latency.

Network Redux’s business-critical applications for production hosting, staging, dev and QA all reside on Internap infrastructure. The Seastar system requires low latency, raw compute power and high availability for optimal performance.

Low latency – For a compute-intensive distributed network, low latency is a critical requirement. Replicating data between locations, in this case between the East and West coasts, depends on multiple carriers for speed and reliability. Internap’s Performance IP™ service provides cost-efficient, route-optimized connectivity to ensure the fastest path to the destination, and Network Redux is able to traverse between its East and West coast data centers in less than 70 milliseconds.

High compute – In addition to low latency, a high-performance infrastructure for Apache Cassandra requires maximal computational and I/O capabilities. Seastar uses carefully selected hardware that provides fast processing and storage, and Internap provides the network performance needed to speed data into and out of the data platform.

Easy scalability – To achieve ultimate reliability and always-on access to data, the Seastar service benefits from the high-density power capabilities of Internap’s data centers. As data volume increases over time and the company needs to add more data center storage and servers, the ability to access additional power is critical.

The ability to process, analyze and store massive amounts of data is only as good as the infrastructure it’s built on. Internap is proud to be the high-performance infrastructure provider of choice for the Seastar service from Network Redux.