Rackspace Lures Companies in Highly Regulated Industries with New Dedicated MongoDB Offering

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Rackspace is helping customers in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services take advantage of the scalability of MongoDB with a new dedicated option of ObjectRocket for MongoDB databases.

Rackspace made the announcement on Monday at MongoDB World, a two-day conference held in New York for developers, sysadmins and DBAs. Rackspace is platinum sponsor of the event.

MongoDB database as a service provider ObjectRocket joined Rackspace in 2013, and is now part of the company’s data storage division.

Chris Lalonde, co-founder of ObjectRocket, said that the new dedicated MongoDB offering “is our general awesomeness but packaged into cabinets.”

“The cabinet has all the components that we offer to customers but in a fully isolated and dedicated infrastructure,” he tells the WHIR in a phone interview.

In a statement, Lalonde said that dedicated ObjectRocket lets applications scale to millions of MongoDB operations per second and customers can access MongoDB experts 24×7 for all their support needs.

David Swanger, senior director of data services solution marketing said that Rackspace’s new offering brings more security, an important consideration for enterprises that have to meet stringent compliance requirements.

“With databases, things like security, encryption and isolation are incredibly important for those types of customers,” he said. “With these big, expensive enterprise databases like Oracle and SQL Server, those vendors have done a good job of building that functionality into those databases, but on the flip side they’re really hard to manage and really expensive, and are somewhat inflexible in terms of what you can actually do with the databases.”

“What happened over the last few years is there have been all of these new entrants coming into the field, like MongoDB, and CouchBase and Cassandra. They’re all open source databases and are a lot more flexible in terms of what you can actually do with the database, and they’re also free. They check a lot of those boxes.”

“The issue is they are not as robust in terms of the security and isolation type of features and the learning curve that’s needed to be able to get those databases to work in a high security and isolated environment it is really difficult and it takes a lot of special expertise,” Swanger said.

Lalonde said that the level of isolation that the dedicated ObjectRocket for MongoDB is “good enough for large enterprises”, and the offering also includes on-disk encryption, which he claims to be a first – “there’s nobody else in the field that offers on-disk encryption for Mongo as far as I’m aware especially in that sort of fully dedicated environment.”

However, it appears that there is a least one other database as a service provider offering disk encryption. MongoDirector offers disk encryption that encrypts data at rest, and its MongoDB hosting includes dedicated instances, according to its website.

While so far MongoDB has mostly been used by mobile and gaming companies, Swanger said, the database has reached a new level maturity which is opening it up to a wider customer base.

“…[Y]ou go back two or three years ago and [MongoDB] was really developer-driven, it was probably more startups using it,” he said. “Now it’s sort of coming into mainstream adoption and big companies are using it for a lot of different things. We’re really excited for the ecosystem as a whole to reach this new level of maturity where enterprises are not just looking at using Oracle or Microsoft but they’re looking at Mongo as a viable alternative for mobile and things like that.”

Rackspace will continue to offer fully managed versions of other databases includingRedis, Hadoop, Apache Spark, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Percona and Maria DB.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-lures-companies-in-highly-regulated-industries-with-new-dedicated-mongodb-offering