The Twelve Days of Scale-Out: iStockphoto.com Grows to a Top-100 U.S. Web Site with MySQL Enterprise Unlimited

Day Ten of MySQL AB's "Twelve Days of Scale-Out"

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- June 20, 2007 -- MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today announced that iStockphoto -- one of the most popular Web sites in the world -- has scaled out with the MySQL Enterprise database to handle its rapid growth while maintaining high performance and high availability. In the past three years, iStockphoto.com has grown from being one of the top 3,000 most-visited global Web sites to one of the top 300, according to Alexa.com. In the United States, it's now one of the 100 most-visited sites.

MySQL is featuring iStockphoto today as part of its “Twelve Days of Scale-Out” educational initiative. Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site will be highlighting how many of the world’s fastest-growing companies are using the MySQL database to cost-effectively scale-out their successful online businesses. The campaign is live at www.mysql.com/scaleout.

iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com) is the world’s busiest image market, with an image downloaded every 2.5 seconds. iStock pioneered the micropayment phenomenon in this industry, enabling buyers to license images for as little as a dollar. iStockphoto entered the stock video market in September of 2006, selling video for as low as $5 per 30 second clip. In partnership with its members, iStockphoto has turned community into commerce, transforming the digital imagery market by encouraging passionate dialogue and education, while making imagery affordable to businesses that may not have licensed imagery otherwise.

“We've grown rapidly as a company, and MySQL has scaled with us," said Brent Nelson, director of IT and Infrastructure at iStock. "With our continued growth, we have been relying more on MySQL, and the fact that we can get 24/7 enterprise-level support and consulting services from the developers through MySQL Enterprise Unlimited is vital to iStock’s operations.”

iStock's ‘Growing’ Challenge

When iStockphoto.com launched, the images in its database were available free-of-charge, the entire company ran on one server, and traffic was minimal. In the seven years since, iStockphoto has attracted a global community of more than 1.5 million members, and its photo library now contains over 1.8 million photos, flash files, illustrations and video clips. iStock has more than 35,000 contributors world-wide and adds over 30,000 images to its collection every week.

For iStockphoto.com, scalability has become mission-critical. Being able to manage increasing volumes of data and transactions has to be carefully balanced with IT budgets and resource expenditures.

iStock's MySQL Scale-Out Solution

At first, the decision to go with the MySQL database was primarily for its dramatic cost-savings, but as the traffic to iStockphoto.com grew, scaling out with MySQL on commodity hardware has been a key enabler to handling this rapid growth. MySQL tracks every photo submitted and manages the site’s permissions and billing systems. Their modern scale-out architecture features a LAMP stack with 17 replicated MySQL database servers, containing 528 tables and 512 million rows.

iStock has also subscribed to MySQL Enterprise Unlimited to continue to stay ahead of the curve. This affordable, company-wide enterprise site agreement is a simple way for organizations to help plan for the unexpected. For an unprecedented low price, iStock gets access to monthly software updates, premium technical support, and advanced monitoring and advisory tools that help identify and fix potential database problems before they can negatively impact production systems.

“For many companies today, explosive business growth is both a blessing and a huge challenge -- there are always plenty of IT projects to be developed and never enough resources, budget or time,” said Kerry Ancheta, MySQL AB’s vice president of North American Enterprise Sales. “MySQL Enterprise Unlimited is designed to make it easier and more affordable for CIOs to acquire and support production database software throughout their entire organizations.”

What is Scale-Out?

Scale-Out is a modern computing architecture that enables organizations to improve application performance and scalability on an incremental, as-needed basis by adding multiple replicated database servers on low-cost commodity hardware. This is in contrast to a ‘Scale-Up’ approach, which requires organizations to make a large up-front investment in more expensive and complex server hardware and database licenses in order to add capacity.

Today, MySQL will be hosting a special worldwide Webinar titled, “Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses”. To register for this event or view a replay, please visit www.mysql.com/scaleoutwebinar.

About MySQL

MySQL AB develops and supports a family of high-performance, affordable database products. The company’s flagship offering is 'MySQL Enterprise’, a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services.

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software, with over 11 million active installations. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia and YouTube.

With headquarters in the United States and Sweden -- and operations around the world -- MySQL AB supports both open source values and corporate customers' needs in a profitable, sustainable business model. For more information about MySQL, please visit www.mysql.com.

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