Rackspace Brings Managed MongoDB ObjectRocket Service To Europe

Rackspace has launched ObjectRocket, a fully managed NoSQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) built with MongoDB, across Europe.

Hosted in a UK data centre, the service promises to maximise uptime and reduce administration efforts for big data applications. It has been available in the US since March.

Rackspace acquired ObjectRocket in February 2013, hoping to establish a presence in the rapidly growing non-relational database market and attract customers that require a reliable back-end for analytics.

Say no to SQL

According to DB-Engines, MongoDB (from ‘humongous’) is the most popular NoSQL database system in the world. NoSQL databases are not built on tables, and tend not to use structured query language to manipulate data, which allows for more flexibility and scalability.

With ObjectRocket, everything from the file system and OS kernel to hardware has been optimised specifically to run MongoDB. This allows Rackspace to offer latency as low as 2ms and higher bandwidth, especially to its British customers. All of the data is stored on Solid State Drives and since it is multiplexed across many physically separate systems, the possibility of downtime is minimal.

J.R. Arredondo from Rackspace previously outlined the difficulties facing customers that want to host MongoDB on the public cloud, including scalability issues, high storage requirements and the absence of any availability guarantee.

“At ObjectRocket we set out from day one to make the highest performing, available and scalable MongoDB-as-a-Service,” said Chris Lalonde, ObjectRocket co-founder. “Our services are designed by engineers and for engineers. In today’s world you never know if you’re going to need to support 10 transactions per second or a million transactions per second and customers demand a solution without administrative complexity.”

Rackspace already offers managed hosting for Apache Hadoop framework, another popular tool for analytics.

In October 2013, MongoDB (until recently known as 10gen) secured $150 million (£93.5m) from investors including Salesforce.com, Intel Capital, EMC and Red Hat  – more funding in a single round than any other database vendor in history.

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