We’re experiencing exciting growth at FFW. Sticking to our promise of delivery excellence and best in industry Drupal expertise, our clients and partners are, in return considering us an ever more critical strategic element of their Drupal capability. This month, as we continue to expand our presence in the Boston area, we’ve formally kicked off an exciting partnership with a technology startup - Parelastic.

Parlastic is a venture backed database scale out solution - poised to help heavy transaction oriented sites scale out on demand - without the need for more expensive hardware, sharding, and other manually intensive solutions. As the Parelastic team calls it - they are the database virtualization engine. In a recent independent test executed by a 3rd party Drupal consultancy, Parelastic was shown to handle 2x the traffic in half the response time - doing it all dynamically with no risk or disruption to existing production performance.

The database ecosystem is a fairly noisy space, with a plethora of solutions claiming to solve all of our database woes - everything from NoSQL, NewSQL, and a multitude of other plays. But what really stands out about Parelastic is the ease of use - requiring no change to your existing database - it essentially sits between application and database. It works with a number of standard database solutions including MySQL.

Once in place - Parelastic does the rest - handling the on demand scale out needs of your database without need for human intervention. And it only takes what it needs, when it needs it - meaning you don’t waste dollars on additional capacity thats no longer needed. Pretty exciting huh? Particularly when you consider the disruption caused by other solutions that require you to migrate your data to a new database platform along with learning curve, and the need to change and test application code. This is all the more exciting when you consider the promise of soon to arrive Drupal 8 and the abstraction of the database layer.

FFW and Parelastic have joined forces to co-market our services, and share office space in Boston. Its an arrangement that provides both teams with the ability to leverage each others resources, talents, and mindshare, while doing our bit for the environment - making the most of physical assets that might otherwise be duplicated or wasted. Our goal in this arrangement is to help each other to provide a more complete offering and even more robust, cost effective solutions for our mutual clients and partners.

With Parelastic targeting high transaction read/write scenarios one of the obvious applications of this, particularly in the Drupal ecosystem, is eCommerce. FFW, co-partnered with Acquia and CommerceGuys, provides the consulting and development “glue” to create highly performant commerce solutions. For those high demand implementations - simply add Parelastic to the mix and you’ve got a no risk high transaction offering that can scale to meet any demand during your peak transaction periods, whilst also reducing overall cost of ownership. No license - just fantastic experiences for your end customer.

If you’re interested in learning more about Parelastic check out their website at www.parelastic.com. Stay tuned for partnership developments, announcements, and hopefully a whole bunch of exciting joint case studies to come.