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Galera Cluster: World’s Most Advanced Technology to Protect Against Data Loss

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Revolutionising the field of high availability and data protection

Loss of data is a major challenge for a company nowadays, as it is directly connected with a loss of revenue. An EU-funded project introduces a database management toolkit providing a high-availability solution for open-source databases.

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Information, the core of all aspects of human life, consists of data, which is raw, random and disorderly facts. Our ability to process, organise and contextualise these scattered elements, to produce meaning and to use them in our decision making distinguishes us, humans, from other forms of life. Data is therefore an invaluable source of knowledge. The more digitised our life becomes, the more crucial data proves to be for the safety and the development of economic activity, amongst other sectors. The EU-funded GALERACLUSTER project focused on developing an innovative database clustering solution that ensures 99.999 % availability for companies’ data. The project is the result of almost one decade of previous research and product development by a team of expert software developers, PhD holders, and experienced management and marketing specialists. “Recruiting and finding competent people for project execution was more difficult than expected. It took longer than we anticipated,” admits project coordinator Sakari Keskitalo. Finalising the product launch during the pandemic was a time-consuming challenge as well: “COVID-19 face-to-face meetings with customers and project meetings were cancelled. The conferences where we usually go to market our product and make presentations were cancelled, while some of the conferences were moved to online sessions,” he explains.

A premium answer to data protection

The GALERACLUSTER solution is immune to server failures, thanks to a set of database replicas that will continue working without interruption, thus keeping services up. The servers communicate through protocols and constantly monitor the network, hardware and software health, allowing the cluster as a whole to provide uninterruptable service and protect against data loss. The flexible architecture allows adding additional servers to the cluster without interruption to provide more data capacity. Thanks to these features, GALERACLUSTER is a survival tool even for major disasters where an entire data centre fails. Requiring less than 3 hours to set up, GALERACLUSTER is considerably easier to install and use compared to other solutions on the market, and maintenance can be done without shutting down the service. Moreover, it is an open-source software constantly assessed and evaluated by the user community, while its experts provide continuous consulting for architecture designs, implementation and performance tuning. Next to its other advantages, GALERACLUSTER’s significantly lower total cost of ownership against proprietary solutions and provides the same degree of protection against data loss to be used for critical business applications and business continuity. So far, it is trusted by thousands of users in telecommunication, e-commerce, media, banking, insurance, payment solutions, government, gaming, betting, software as a service and database as a service.

An ongoing improvement process

However, the project team believes that perfect is the enemy of good. “We will continue with the new business lines and software solutions described in the project. The development of database management software continues as we add new features, performance and stability to our products,” states Keskitalo. “Commercialisation and dissemination of the GALERACLUSTER project results will go on for many years as we try to find new customers and partners. We will primarily use open-source strategy for broad adoption and credibility.”

Keywords

GALERACLUSTER, data, software, data loss, open-source, database management, clustering solution, business continuity

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