Xeround: MySQL Elastic, Always-on Storage Engine for the Cloud

Xeround provides database virtualization software based on its patented Intelligent Data Grid (IDG), an innovative technology that unifies data across multiple networks and businesses in real time. Xeround IDG enables companies such as service providers to reduce total cost of ownership and deliver new services to market faster. Unlike point products or custom solutions, Xeround’s reusable, easy-to-implement distributed architecture dramatically increases the efficiency of existing infrastructures.

Cloud database provider Xeround has made its MySQL database available as an add-on within Heroku’s PaaS offering, following on its availability for Amazon EC2 users in September, and likely preceding availability on a number of other cloud computing platforms. For Xeround, the bet on being the premiere database service for the cloud is a stark contrast to the company’s pre-2010 business strategy of selling data virtualization to telcos. However, it currently has the cloud database market largely to itself, as well as a technology that can easily adapt to its surroundings, wherever they might be.

Xeround has been around since 2005, and began its existence selling a data virtualization product to telcos that allowed them to view all of their siloed data in a single place so they could get a unified view of the entire business, not just on a department-by-department basis. However, when Razi Sharir took over as CEO, he spotted an opportunity to transform the business to serve the greater market for cloud computing users (although it still serves a few legacy telco customers, including T-Mobile). Xeround still uses the core IP, only it has been tweaked to include a MySQL front end on top of the Xeround back end, which, interestingly, runs in-memory and utilizes NoSQL concepts. According to Sharir, Xeround’s technology can now accommodate pretty much any front end, and MySQL might just be the beginning.

Features:

1. Auto Scaling – your database scales up or out across multiple nodes when more capacity or throughput are required and shrinks back down when it is underutilized.
2. No Downtime SLA Guarantee – Xeround’s built-in replicas and auto-healing architecture ensures your database is always available.
3. Scheduled Backups
4. Unlimited Throughput
5. Phone, email & web support
6. Zero Maintenance
7. No code changes to your app!

The first 30 days of using Xeround are free. Once the trial period ends your database instance would be charged by actual usage- depending on its data size and data transfer. There are no subscription commitment or minimum charges.

Sign up today to create your free cloud database on Rackspace.

Conclusion 

There’s a lot of value to a third-party database service that can travel with users as they move from cloud to cloud, and that hide a a cloud-optimized back end under a familiar SQL front end. Whether it’s Xeround, NimbusDB or someone else altogether providing the capability, it’s an area that’s poised to take off as cloud servers and storage become widely accepted. Xeround is just ahead of the game for the time being.