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Aerospike accelerates: Strong Consistency with High Performance in Aerospike 4.0

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Brian Bulkowski
Aerospike Founder and CTO
March 7, 2018|3 min read

We are pleased to announce general availability of Aerospike 4.0, which includes strong consistency.

Aerospike 4.0’s Strong Consistency technology is a revolutionary leap forward for high fidelity data uses. In cases where an application’s reliability requirements might demand PostGres, MySQL or Oracle primary key correctness, Aerospike 4.0 can now be used, with dramatically lower latency and higher throughput. Data will not be lost, even during network partitions and in the face of hardware failures and version upgrades.

The technical problem is extraordinarily challenging. Aerospike’s work in this area has taken two years, and encompases a high resolution Lamport clock, an improved transaction commit model that provides an effective two-phase commit without transaction logging, improved cluster management to correctly detect cluster splits and provide the maximum amount of availability, and an optional “commit to disk” feature which requires acknowledgement by the storage layer for every write.

Aerospike’s Early Access program, which started in October 2017, has been invaluable in proving out both the technology and business use cases. Early Access users include industry leading social media companies, next-generation transaction clearing houses, and existing advertising industry customers.In order to provide evidence that Aerospike has achieved strong consistency, we have submitted this release to Kyle Kingsbury of Jepsen, who stated:

“In hundreds of tests of SC mode through network partitions, 3.99.1.5 and higher versions have not shown any sign of nonlinearizable histories, lost increments to counters, or lost updates to sets.”

Performance has been measured using industry-standard YCSB tests. When using two copies of data, and using “session consistency” mode, performance is nearly identical between the two modes. Fully Linearized reads, retaining more than two copies of data, and commit to device will decrease performance, but multi-million TPS systems remain practical.

Aerospike’s reliance on Flash storage for persistence, and the Hybrid Memory storage architecture, allowed us to build on our existing reputation for high performance and high reliability. Tim Smith, senior vice president of operations at AppNexus, said

“At AppNexus, we help marketers engage their audiences with relevant advertising based on numerous targeting criteria. Aerospike is the database solution that enables us to manage over 50 billion unique data points globally and search those data points over 4 trillion times per month with almost all of those searches taking 8 milliseconds or less. Aerospike allows us to do this cost effectively without any downtime or compromises.”

Don Haderle, IBM Fellow and “Father of DB2”, said

“Aerospike, with its patented Hybrid-Memory Architecture, is already the first choice for use in internet scale, real-time applications. With the advent of Aerospike 4.0 now delivering strong consistency while preserving its industry-leading high performance and scalability, Aerospike is providing enterprises a revolutionary tool to create rich consumer and machine-to-machine experiences. World’s best performance and strong consistency — can’t beat it.”

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