ClickHouse > Case Studies > Supercolumn: NANO Corp.'s Journey from Experimentation to Production with ClickHouse

Supercolumn: NANO Corp.'s Journey from Experimentation to Production with ClickHouse

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases

Applicable Industries

Education
Electrical Grids

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Procurement

Use Cases

Cybersecurity
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

Cybersecurity Services
Hardware Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

NANO Corp. is a French startup founded in 2019 by former defense personnel. The company was built around in-house technologies that the founders developed and patented. They aimed to revolutionize what software network probes should be, making them versatile and lightweight while also being able to handle bandwidths of up to 100GBit/s without using any gimmicks like packet slicing or sampling. Their probes work entirely on commodity hardware. NANO Corp.'s offering can be summed up in one word: Observability. However, it's not the traditional 'network monitoring' kind. They believe that network performance and cybersecurity are two sides of the same coin and addressing one without the other makes no sense. Their main goal is to analyze complex and changing network traffic at line-rate high speed.

The Challenge

NANO Corp., a French startup founded in 2019, was on a mission to revolutionize network probes. They aimed to create versatile, lightweight probes capable of handling bandwidths up to 100GBit/s on commodity hardware. Their vision was to offer a new kind of observability, one that combined network performance and cybersecurity. However, to fully utilize the potential of their network probes, they needed a robust database. The database had to handle fast and constant inserts, run periodic queries for alerting and custom queries launched by multiple users, and manage large volumes of data efficiently. It also needed to have a hot/cold data buffering system, be easy to maintain and deploy, and be efficient in RAM usage. Traditional RDBMS, which their main engineers had used in their previous careers, were not up to the task. They were too reliant on update speed and required clustering when overall performance became an issue. NANO Corp. needed a database as groundbreaking as their probe.

The Solution

After trying and being disappointed with several traditional OLTP databases, NANO Corp. discovered ClickHouse. Touted as the fastest data warehouse in the market, ClickHouse was able to handle the large volumes of data NANO Corp. needed to manage. It offered fast multiple inserts, fast indexing, powerful materialized views, and a wonderful MergeTree function. ClickHouse's batch insert philosophy was especially suited to NANO Corp.'s technology as they made intermediary batches themselves for all data to be ingested. Data ingestion in ClickHouse was simpler and less taxing on resources, and it allowed for immensely fast lookup queries. ClickHouse also supported JSON format files natively, which was a significant advantage. Despite considering other OLAP databases like Druid or Pinot, NANO Corp. chose to stick with ClickHouse because of its efficiency and ease of maintenance.

Operational Impact

The adoption of ClickHouse as their database solution brought about significant operational improvements for NANO Corp. The company was able to fully utilize the potential of their network probes, thanks to ClickHouse's ability to handle fast and constant inserts, run periodic queries for alerting and custom queries launched by multiple users, and manage large volumes of data efficiently. The database's batch insert philosophy was especially suited to NANO Corp.'s technology, allowing for simpler data ingestion architecture and easier maintenance. This was crucial for NANO Corp., as they were still a small startup and needed a solution that was powerful, scalable, and easy to maintain. The adoption of ClickHouse also saved computational power, which was needed because their probes sent data for ClickHouse to be ingested constantly while also running constant queries on hot and cold data.

Quantitative Benefit

ClickHouse was able to handle the large volumes of data NANO Corp. needed to manage.
Data ingestion in ClickHouse was simpler and less taxing on resources.
ClickHouse allowed for immensely fast lookup queries.