AdAction Accelerates Ad Serving Performance with Membase Server

Mountain View, Calif. – April 19, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that Sweden-based AdAction, makers of a powerful platform for web-based advertising campaigns, has accelerated its data processing speed by 10x  using Membase Server. The migration from Apache Cassandra enabled AdAction to consistently exceed customer service-level agreements (SLAs) for performance and uptime, while at the same time reducing administrative overhead, particularly as their volume of business grows.

News Highlights

• Since 2002 AdAction has optimized the internet marketing for companies such as American Express, Scandinavian Airlines, Volkswagen, Universal Pictures and Travelocity, among others, in Europe’s Nordic region. AdAction’s core product provides ad serving solutions for its customers. The company stores massive amounts of consumer data (from 75 million consumers each month) that needs to be accessed and analyzed, and ultimately serve up highly targeted online ads—all in real time. Moreover, AdAction’s business model is “pay for performance” – the company earns revenue when their customers’ ads convert to sales. To maximize revenues, AdAction must present consumers with highly targeted ads every time.
• AdAction tried several NoSQL data management systems to store and retrieve the profile data use by its ad serving system. The most recent contender was Cassandra, which AdAction deployed with hopes of not only supporting their latency goals, but also enabling automatic expansion of cluster as user and data volumes increased. Initial implementations, however, proved to be sluggish in performance, cumbersome to rebalance and required significant downtime for upkeep and expansion.
• Looking for a better alternative, AdAction found Membase Server, which met all the requirements of their ad serving system:
  • Simple: AdAction was able to migrate to Membase Server quickly and easily in phases over just two weeks.
  • Fast: Designed for extreme low latency, Membase Server retrieves user profile data 10 times faster than Cassandra, giving AdAction substantially more headroom to process the profile data and serve up a highly targeted ad in the time allotted.
  • Elastic: Every new client that AdAction signs on brings thousands of new users and an upsurge in data volume—sometimes by as much as 10% overnight. But with Membase Server, the AdAction team can now add new cluster nodes with just a few clicks and have them up and running instantly, with no downtime, no impact on performance, and no administrative hassle.

Supporting Quotes

“We needed a system that is simple to use and manage, provides low latency and high throughput, and expands to support our business at any scale. Our future success is tied to our ability to deploy new nodes seamlessly, on demand, with no downtime or time-consuming manual re-balancing. The new infrastructure enables us to deliver on our promise – highly targeted ads served within 100 milliseconds 99.99% of the time. As a result, we are delivering a consistently excellent service for our clients and their end customers.”
– Wouter de Bie, systems developer for AdAction

“When it comes to serving ads, time is money, so AdAction requires the highest availability and lowest latency to meet our obligations. Membase Server provides fast and reliable performance for our millions of users. We no longer have to worry about working odd hours to restart cluster nodes and we can easily scale operations when traffic increases dramatically overnight.”
– Johan Stille, system developer, AdAction

“For many websites, the ability to monetize web traffic through ad and offer targeting is critical. Membase Server is gaining a lot of momentum with online advertisers for our ability to reliably retrieve operational data in substantially less time than other NoSQL alternatives, giving companies like AdAction much more processing time to accurately and effectively target ads that drive results – both for them, and their customers.”
– Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase