You may have read our recent blog posts, one about Continuent’s new terminology and another describing Tungsten Clustering topologies (standard clusters, composite active/passive clusters, and composite active/passive clusters).
Along with the terminology changes, we have also created a set of new pricing policies in an effort to simplify our product lines.
These changes will make both products and pricing easier to understand, and at the same time allow for more product flexibility as we make steady progress towards our cloud-based offering.
This blog post outlines our annual Tungsten Clustering pricing model for both the software subscriptions and related 24/7 support. We will also be revisiting our annual Tungsten Replicator subscription pricing model and support - but that’s for a future communication.
New Tungsten Clustering Products: Updated Pricing
Historically we have called all of our clustering solutions "Tungsten Clustering" without distinguishing between various deployment models.
We have decided to make the distinction between a simple cluster and a cluster of clusters, or as we call it, a composite cluster. Additionally, Tungsten composite clustering may be deployed in either an active/passive or an active/active mode creating an additional level of separation.
The Tungsten Clustering family now includes three distinct products:
- Tungsten Cluster
- Tungsten Cluster+ active/passive
- Tungsten Cluster+ active/active
Tungsten Cluster is a MySQL high-availability solution, which provides infinite scalability using Pod architecture.
- Each simple cluster typically has a minimum of 3 nodes, but you can also build 5-node or bigger clusters to scale-up for additional read traffic.
- The Tungsten Cluster per-node subscription is priced per year with an additional fee for 24/7 support services.
Tungsten Cluster+ active/passive provides high availability for geo-distributed business- and mission-critical MySQL applications.
- Tungsten Cluster+ active/passive deployments include two or more Tungsten clusters in an active/passive relationship (composite active/passive).
- There will be one active cluster containing one writable primary database plus replica db's, and one or more passive Tungsten clusters for geo-scale read traffic.
- The Tungsten Cluster+ active/passive per-node subscription is priced per year with an additional fee for the 24/7 support services.
Tungsten Cluster+ active/active provides five-9s availability for geo-distributed business- and mission-critical active/active MySQL applications.
- Tungsten Cluster+ active/active deployments includes two or more Tungsten clusters in an active/active relationship (composite active/active).
- Every cluster is active and has one writable primary database plus two or more replica databases for local reads.
- The annual Tungsten Cluster+ active/active per-node subscription is priced per year with an additional fee for the 24/7 support services.
Tungsten 24/7 Support Subscriptions
Continuent has historically offered only one level of support for business-critical and mission-critical needs: 24/7/365 featuring industry-leading rapid response times with all cases handled by our highly experienced, knowledgeable team.
We intend to keep it this way. 24/7 only.
Our customers’ business-critical needs deserve the industry's best support.
The average response time for urgent support requests, across all of our customers during the past two years, is an amazing 3 minutes or less. This is the best, by far, within our industry.
Also, a very noteworthy fact is that the people who provide support have 15 to 20 years of experience with a MySQL DBA and/or SaaS site reliability engineering background. Continuent 24/7 support is by default Tungsten-specific, but since our solution is tightly-coupled to MySQL, we do end up dealing with MySQL issues too. That said, we do not replace your DBA team, we augment them with our deep MySQL knowledge.
The Tungsten 24/7 annual support subscription fee is based on the size and complexity of your deployment. Continuent charges an annual flat fee for the 24/7 standby services plus a percentage of the total value of the deployment.
We value our support services very highly, so support fee discounts are not available.
Continuent Non-Linear Pricing and TCO
Non-Linear Pricing
Continuent is a commercial solution for open source databases, yet we want to match the open source pricing approach and logic as closely as possible.
Continuent pricing is non-linear. This means that the larger the deployment, the lower the per-node unit pricing becomes for Tungsten Cluster. Once a customer's deployment has grown large enough, additional nodes become practically free-of-charge.
Another way the customer benefits is with our ’true-up policy’, which allows for the addition of new nodes free-of-charge during the agreed-upon subscription period. For larger Continuent Tungsten deployments, a site license pricing model is also available.
Total Cost of Ownership
Total Cost of Ownership matters!
Do not automatically assume that Continuent’s commercial offering is more expensive than a ‘free’ open-source alternative.
Open source solutions are often perceived as free. But in reality, patching together components from various open-source tools to cover your needs will cost you time and money - much more than you might expect!
Besides the initial development and deployment cost, those loosely-coupled, home-grown open-source mash-ups are often quite expensive to develop, support, and maintain. Also note that if you lose the original developer of the in-house solution, you may be completely out of luck.
Continuent offers a complete, tested, and proven tightly-integrated MySQL clustering solution (incl. built-in proxies and orchestration), combined with 24/7 support at a very cost-effective price.
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