Magus

Story Details

London-based Magus is a fast growing Web services company that provides hosted Web applications to large corporations located in the United Kingdom and Europe. The 10-year-old organization is one of the leading providers of innovative Web content engineering solutions in the U.K.

Magus offers a range of subscription-based managed services, including ActiveStandards, which helps companies stay on-brand, on-line by tracking and managing corporate web standards compliance, and a multisite search engine that provides integrated search frameworks for enterprise Web sites. Magus’s clients include a wide range of multinational companies such as Shell, Unilever and AkzoNobel as well as government organizations, law firms and banks.

Since all Magus clients have offices throughout the world, it is imperative that Magus provides reliable services around the clock. “Our entire business depends on the provision of online services that rely on a scalable, highly available data management platform,” states Simon Lande, CEO and founder of Magus. “Our margin for error is very low.”

To support its offerings, Magus had been using the MySQL database management system for the past several years. Specifically, Magus used MySQL Community Edition, the freely downloadable open-source version of Sun's MySQL database.

In early 2008, however, Magus forecast a much higher load on its databases due to increasing customer demands, and planned to scale up its infrastructure accordingly. “The requirements for reliability and availability were paramount, so we knew we couldn’t continue with the edition of MySQL we were using, for our future needs” says Dan Hanley, chief technology officer for Magus. “We needed higher performance and better backup and failover technology, and we didn’t feel we had the in-house knowledge and capability to support those things ourselves.”

In July 2008, Magus began evaluating new technologies. “We conducted a very thorough evaluation of other databases and vendors,” remarks Lande. “To support the next step in our growth, we needed to scale our infrastructure with reliable technology.”

After evaluating a number of options Magus decided to partner with Sun Microsystems, which offers MySQL Enterprise. This subscription-based offering includes MySQL database software and services, updates and quarterly service packs with the newest bug fixes of the software, and around-the-clock production support from Sun.

Sun support was one of the primary drivers in the decision. “Sun’s expertise and support were critical for us in this decision,” explains Lande. “Also, the response we received from Sun even before implementation was excellent. They were eager to help us, and that made us even more confident we’d made the right decision.” In the summer of 2008, a Sun consultant worked with Magus to quickly implement MySQL Enterprise. “We had to take out the entire database layer and replace it with the new technology without any downtime or customer impact,” says Lande. “Because of Sun’s expertise, we were able to do that. It was a very smooth process.”

Cost was also a key factor in choosing MySQL Enterprise. “The lack of licensing fees is a huge advantage,” Lande says. “We’re able to save money with MySQL Enterprise.”

Since deploying MySQL Enterprise, both reliability and performance have been able to scale in line with Magus's growth, thanks to the technology's replication functionality. “Reliability and availability have always been major considerations,” Lande states. “Using the previous version of MySQL, we knew that if the server ever failed, it was a complex procedure to get back up and running with minimal downtime. Now, if the main server fails, we're back up and running in only about 30 seconds.”

With MySQL Enterprise, Magus’s read-only Web applications do not have to compete with background batch processes for database space. “Our applications are only using the read-only server, which has helped improve performance,” Lande says. “Our ActiveStandards application, for example, has improved in response time by about 300 percent to keep up with increased volumes of data processed. It’s been a big success and has increased overall customer satisfaction.”

MySQL Enterprise also contains new enhanced monitoring tools that give Magus developers a graphical user interface through which they can view the entire database environment. “Those tools have been helpful, because they allow us to see how much memory is being used and to easily analyze database queries,” Hanley says.

The backup and recovery process has also improved tremendously. “Previously, the data backup process took several hours to complete,” says Hanley. “Now, we have integrated MySQL Enterprise backup and recovery capabilities, and the process is almost instantaneous.”

Lande adds that Sun’s ongoing support and services have confirmed that the choice to go with MySQL Enterprise was the right one. “We always receive prompt answers to our questions, as well as great suggestions on ways to solve challenges,” Lande says. “The support has been outstanding.”