Data Infrastructure is a wildly broad term that describes the hardware and software responsible for managing the data that powers… modern civilization. It includes the databases, applications, interfaces, caching, and replication technologies used to persist, query, and manage the data, as well as the servers, network equipment, and security infrastructure necessary to deliver it safely and reliably. Data Infrastructure is the foundation upon which data management strategy is built.

Effective data infrastructure enables organizations to coordinate large volumes of data, apply analytics, facilitate access, and ensure data integrity, ultimately leading to meaningful information and knowledge for decision-making. It also comprises the rules, procedures, and standards to ensure data quality and ease of use.

Given the importance of the data it holds, data infrastructure is also exceedingly complex. To limit their role in that complexity, most database providers shift performance challenges at scale onto IT and DevOps. Traditionally, the solution is to throw money at the problem. As such, cutting-edge product innovation is simply out of reach for all but the largest organizations.

Unparalleled performance, scalability, and latency

The team at HarperDB understood this problem well. Jaxon Repp, Field CTO at HarperDB explains, “When your database is running in a single data center, scaling your application to serve a global user base requires adding capacity to that single location, or dividing and deploying that capacity across multiple locations- hopefully close to your users. We knew we wanted the latter, but nothing on the market met those requirements the way we envisioned them.”

The act of distributing capacity across multiple locations is inherently challenging. How do you reconcile a transaction happening on one node across the rest of your cluster? How do you reconcile hundreds of thousands of transactions a second? Indeed, there are peer-reviewed academic papers in respected scientific journals going back decades that attempt to tease out this complexity and define (theoretical) solutions.

“This was the crux of the problem we were trying to solve as developers,” says Jaxon. “How do we make something so complex feel simple? We didn’t just want to deploy more nodes of a database technology we already disliked, we wanted a platform for applications and their data that could scale from PoC to production, and which abstracted away all the complexity. We wanted to make building stuff fun again.”

So, the HarperDB team set out to solve one of the hardest problems in data science. And in doing so, they created a distributed application platform that delivers orders of magnitude faster performance, lower global latency, and greater cost-efficiency than any other technology on the market.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

HarperDB’s platform manages data across a fabric of globally distributed application servers, enabling a seamless experience that improves performance by moving applications and data closer to users, allowing for both unlimited scale and a superior developer experience.

In effect, HarperDB provides the entire application stack in a single process, ensuring distributed applications have everything they need to instantly return responses without depending on external systems- or the network hops necessary to reach them. A global footprint means data can be ingested and delivered from millions of devices no matter where they are.

High availability through a globally brokered fabric delivery means unparalleled resiliency across the system and unlimited capacity to scale horizontally, helping organizations meet demand without breaking the bank. And finally, having the application layer directly on top of the database means better security; there can’t be a man in the middle attack if there is no middle, after all.

A relentless focus on customer joy

HarperDB’s platform is gaining significant traction in gaming, streaming media, and digital commerce- environments where speed and low latency are key, and a poor user experience translates directly to lost revenue.

HarperDB is now powering some of the largest digital commerce sites and claims several Fortune 10 companies as clients, as well as large network and cloud service providers including Verizon and Lumen. Additionally, HarperDB’s channel partnership with Akamai has brought many interesting customers and use cases to the business to power its growth. All of these customers face the same challenges around scale versus performance versus cost versus complexity. “It’s an amazing feeling for our team to see just how impactful our solution is with global implementations,” says Jaxon.

He references a use case with a large gaming company to illustrate how HarperDB enables previously unachievable performance by integrating a legacy database into HarperDB’s distributed data fabric.

Says Jaxon, “We worked with a gaming company whose core data infrastructure was located entirely on the West Coast. As a result, gamers in Buenos Aires trying to find friends during peak time had to wait up to 11 seconds for a response. While the company had thrown lots of money to vertically scale its source of truth, it had reached the limits of that architecture. Add to that the fact that if their source of truth went down, nobody could find their friends, and a global outage would become an international news story.”

HarperDB was brought in to do a PoC, setting up a bi-directional sync with the company’s Oracle infrastructure, replicating changes to that dataset globally in under 100ms. The result was near-instantaneous responses to user queries and no more global outages.

Notes Jaxon, “We demonstrated that we could reduce their infrastructure spend by 50% while doing so.”

A company on the rise

As its customer roster grows, HarperDB is scaling up. The company recently closed a Series A round led by Serent Capital and employee numbers have grown from 17 to 26. The company’s relationship with Khasm Labs (formerly 5G Open Innovation Labs) has opened doors to a vast network of other startups and large technology partners who are part of the Lab’s ecosystem.

The problem of data infrastructure complexity is all too prominent across enterprises and one that is ripe to be solved by HarperDB and its team.

Says Jaxon, “The amount of data we use to make decisions is only going to grow, and traditional application architectures simply aren’t up to the task. Here at HarperDB, we’re working with our customers to craft the future state of data infrastructure- allowing developers to focus on building applications that delight users at any scale without breaking the bank. It’s one of the toughest problems any of us have ever tackled and has been one of the most rewarding to solve.”