Contributed article by Dr. Michael Waclawiczek, Vice President of Operations, NuoDB, Inc., Cambridge, MA

NuoDB's 2014 Prediction-the Breakout Year for Geo-distribution

New technologies can be intimidating, because we all fear the unknown, and we especially don't want to put something untested into the beating heart of our employer's infrastructure.  But clinging to the past is not the way to go.  It's a dead end. New requirements emerged over the past ten years and have become the imperatives of today.

An October 2013 study conducted by IDG Research for my company found that 50% of participants believe that deploying applications in a consistent manner globally while maintaining the same level of performance and resilience users experience locally, is "critical" or "very important." 60% of these respondents, which included IT executives and management in North America, expect that global deployment performance will become increasingly critical over the next 24 months as their workforces travel and their customer bases expand internationally.

What is interesting about this result is that the same respondents also acknowledged that the need to set up replication mechanisms to keep data synchronized is a database management issue ranked as "a top concern."

A growing number of applications from banking, retail, gaming, collaboration, social media, supply chain, to VoIP, require that user data, enterprise data, social media data and other data types need to be shared in real-time on a global scale.  Moreover, with the rapid increase of mobile devices everywhere from Camden to Cambodia, successful applications will be faced with new challenges and requirements everyday.

These and other concerns force application architects to make many tradeoffs decisions.  Unfortunately many of these are based on the architectural limitations of traditional relational database systems.

In 2014, we expect to see a marked increase in the awareness and appreciation of the global application needs of SaaS vendors, mobile app vendors, and enterprises.  Application developers will gain a better understanding of global deployment requirements, and the data management infrastructure vendors will be releasing better solutions to deal with these growing cloud-scale application deployments.

Increasingly new age DBMS vendors will turn their focus to solving geo-distributed data management challenges. These new generation database systems will need to run as a single, logically-consistent database in any location where the application is installed. They will mask the complexities and reliability issues associated with implementing complex data replication schemes typically necessary when running distinct database systems in different geographies.  They will also need to provide a high degree of resilience to operate continuously even if failures occur in any region.

In the coming year we can expect to see a sharp increase in the demand for deploying applications on a global scale.  So, if you ask if the IDG Research survey predictions for 24 months from now are correct, I would say that they reflect what we at NuoDB are seeing in the marketplace:  a rapidly growing increase in geo-distributed database solutions.

##

About the Author