Rackspace supercharges MongoDB service

Rackspace is now offering hosted versions of the MongoDB data store, using MongoDB management technologies it acquired from its purchase of ObjectRocket in February. It also has contracted with 10gen, the company shepherding the open source MongoDB, to provide advanced support for the service.

ObjectRocket created a platform specifically for running MongoDB in hosted, or cloud, services, said Matt Asay, 10gen’s vice president of corporate strategy. The new service will be “one really good way to pave the path to a successful MongoDB experience,” he said.

Although both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure provide directions for installing and running MongoDB on their clouds, Rackspace is hoping that the ObjectRocket’s technologies will provide a more streamlined process of deploying and managing the data store.

The ObjectRocket platform takes care of a lot of configuration and tuning issues that could flummox an administrator trying to run MongoDB in the cloud for the first time, such as choosing the optimum amount of RAM to allocate, Asay said. It also provides controls for automatically scaling a single server copy to a multi-node cluster deployment, and has tuned the underlying software stack to work specifically with MongoDB.

Before being purchased by Rackspace, ObjectRocket offered MongoDB as a hosted service from its own data centers, tweaking its servers for maximum responsiveness. Rackspace will now offer ObjectRocket-based MongoDB on its own larger, more robust, infrastructure.

On the support side, Rackspace will offer first and second line support, and has contracted 10gen to take on third-tier support, to help resolve particularly thorny customer issues. Also, 10gen will train Rackspace support personnel on MongoDB, Asay said.

MongoDB is one of a one of a number of NoSQL data stores that have appeared in recent years as alternatives to SQL database management systems. MongoDB provides a way to access data through the developer-friendly JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) protocol. It offers a dynamic schema, which makes it easy to add or remove new columns, and comes with auto-sharding for easy scalability.

Rackspace is not alone in offering customized hosted instances of MongoDB. Hosting provider SoftLayer, recently purchased by IBM, also worked with 10gen to offer the data store. 10gen itself also offers to store backup copies of the data store online.