The Twelve Days of Scale-Out: Zillow.com Deploys MySQL Cluster for High Growth with High Availability

CUPERTINO, Calif. — June 22, 2007 — MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today announced that the high-availability MySQL Cluster database conducts critical Web-centric, real-time data processing for Zillow.com, one of the Web’s most-visited real estate sites, with 4.2 million unique visitors in May 2007.

MySQL is featuring Zillow today as part of its “Twelve Days of Scale-Out” educational initiative. Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site has been 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.

Zillow.com is an online real estate community where homeowners, buyers, sellers, and real estate agents and professionals can find and share vital information about homes, for free. Launched in early 2006 with ZestimateTM values and data on millions of U.S. homes, Zillow has since “opened up” the site to community input, data and dialogue, including Home Q&A. Zillow’s goal is to help people become smarter about real estate — what homes are worth, what’s for sale, and what local experts have to say about real estate and individual homes. One of the most-visited real estate Web sites, Zillow was the only online company named by Advertising Age magazine to its 2006 “Marketing 50” list of the most powerful consumer brands.

“We’ve always known that our capacity to handle rapid Web traffic growth would be critical to the success of Zillow,” said Brian Milnes, director of IT Operations at Zillow. “We selected MySQL Cluster as a low-cost, high throughput database with easy scalability — and it has delivered. MySQL Cluster has enabled us to manage our growth smoothly, cost-effectively and intelligently plan for future expansion.”

MySQL Cluster combines the world’s most popular open source database with a fault tolerant database clustering architecture to deliver mission-critical database applications with 99.999 percent availability. With the performance and high throughput required to meet the most demanding applications, MySQL Cluster enables incremental, linear scaling without having to invest in expensive hardware.

Zillow’s ‘Growing’ Challenge
As soon as Zillow launched, it immediately generated a massive amount of Web traffic. As the company expanded its data and services and started to promote its distinctive brand, interest in Zillow continued to climb. Zillow’s founders knew from the company’s inception that the site’s ability to quickly process and manage massive amounts of data — in real time — would be key to its success. The company identified a need for a low latency and reliable Web database that would enable them to continue to increase the capacity of their infrastructure indefinitely without sacrificing performance.

Zillow’s MySQL Scale-Out Solution
Zillow uses MySQL Cluster — a special high availability version of MySQL — as the high transaction, low latency Web-centric database to conduct critical data processing for Zillow.com, in real time. The open source database has helped Zillow scale on a single interface to meet many of the database requirements that a high-growth Web site requires. While Zillow uses a variety of databases to address different data processing needs, MySQL Cluster on inexpensive hardware has proven to be a high availability and low-cost solution for its specialized Web site application. In an average month, Zillow.com now handles 4.2 million unique visitors.

Zillow has also taken advantage of MySQL AB’s expert consulting and support services. MySQL professional services provided Zillow with prototyping and capacity planning to make it easy for the company to launch its service. According to Zillow, its database administrators were able to quickly learn MySQL Cluster’s simple interface and deliver highly available capabilities due to MySQL AB’s responsive technical support team and thorough documentation.

As a result of their success with MySQL Cluster, Zillow is continuing to evaluate the database for new applications that could benefit from an affordable, Scale-Out architecture.

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.

This week, MySQL presented a special worldwide technical webinar on “Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses”. To 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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