SoftLayer and Basho Team on Turnkey Big Data Solution

Service providers are quickly coming up with big data solutions in a turnkey fashion, as cloud presents a massive opportunity for big data going forward. Global cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer and distributed systems company Basho have teamed up on a big data solution. Riak and Riak Enterprise are now available on SoftLayer infrastructure on a consumption-based pricing basis. Riak is an open source, distributed database.

Riak and Riak Enterprise on SoftLayer’s global cloud platform will provide database administration and infrastructure management with the flexibility of SoftLayer's consumption-based pricing. Common use cases for Riak include content delivery platforms and global session stores; aggregating large amounts of data for logging, sear and analytics; and managing, storing and streaming unstructured data and general-purpose data stores.

“The customer demand for easy to deploy and manage big data cloud-based solutions continues to rise,” says Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer. “We are seeing substantial adoption through joint customers, such as Bump, who want to leverage this joint offering. Riak and Riak Enterprise on SoftLayer’s global cloud platform is further validation of our commitment to deliver big data solutions that can run over our highly scalable, automated cloud platform.”

The customer mentioned, Bump, is one of the most popular mobile apps on the market today. The app makes it easy for users to share their contact information, photos, and other objects by simply “bumping” their smartphones. Bump runs on SoftLayer’s infrastructure while using Riak to store user data including events, communications sent and received, handset information and tokens needed to authenticate using social networks.

“Operational ease is key to our business success.” says Mark Smith, Operations Lead at Bump. “The combination of Softlayer, who we already trust with our business and data, and Basho, who makes the database that we trust at scale, saves us time and effort and allows us to focus on our business, not our data infrastructure.”

The new solution makes it easier to create and configure customize Riak clusters at the push of a button. Deployment is standardized, reducing risk of human error. It uses pre-engineered systems that are optimized for Riak including dedicated bare metal servers, for high performance and high reliability. The solution uses best practices based on joint insights, expertise and experience. This allows Riak users to run optimized hardware and OS configurations, automated deployment of multi-data center fault-tolerant clusters, and integrated monitoring and support in the cloud.

High Performance, Scalable Riak Environments in the Cloud

The combination means a more accessible and more flexible, pay as you go option for Riak distributed databases. It’s purchasable in an a la carte fashion through SoftLayer, enabling organizations to quickly deploy big data applications. Organizations can start using Riak more quickly by provisioning a complete solution set through SoftLayer’s portal or API for ease of management, administration and support.

“Basho and SoftLayer have long catered to innovative developers building the next generation of web, social and mobile applications. Today, enterprise customers are demanding the same, an architecture that provides for zero-data loss and ensures zero-downtime.” says Bobby Patrick, Executive Vice President and CMO of Basho. “We believe distributed systems software, such as Riak, and distributed infrastructure is required to help customers truly achieve these ambitions. Basho is excited to partner with SoftLayer to help
companies easily deploy applications that are truly distributed, scalable, and always available.”

Basho is a distributed systems company dedicated to making software that is highly available, fault-tolerant and easy-to-operate at scale. Basho's distributed NoSQL database, Riak and Basho's cloud storage software, Riak CS, are used by fast growing Web businesses and by over 25% of the Fortune 50 to power their critical Web, mobile and social applications and their public and private cloud platforms.

SoftLayer’s Riak solutions are available immediately with prices starting at $359 per month. This price includes an Intel Xeon 1270-based server with 8GB of RAM and two 500GB SATA storage drives.