Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) doesn’t usually get much consideration early in the application development life cycle. But as a business becomes more successful, its applications require a dramatic increase in scale to handle demands from an increasingly mobile Internet constituency. With this increase in scale comes an increase in costs, often exponentially.

There are two types of costs to consider—tangible and intangible. Tangible costs are easy to measure and include things like hardware and software. Intangible costs, though harder to measure, are equally real and include things like downtime (scheduled and unscheduled) and poorly performing websites. At best, these occurrences simply frustrate users. At worst, they result in damage to a brand and users abandoning apps altogether. Other intangible costs such as those for DevOps and IT support are even harder to measure; yet, in terms of impact, these can be substantial—lost opportunity, employee burnout, phone calls at 3AM.

Since 2010, Aerospike has been deployed in some of the most rigorous production environments at an unbeatable TCO. Its dynamic (self-healing) cluster management allows Aerospike to easily scale out, with uptimes of five 9s or better, and rebalance when a node is lost, without requiring extensive, hands-on management. Aerospike’s hybrid memory system allows for a dramatic reduction in node count, usually requiring fewer than 1/5th the number of servers typical of NoSQL and relational database implementations. This alone can save your enterprise millions in capital expenditures, not to mention enable reduced server sprawl, easier maintenance, and less OpEx.