Case Study: Sixgill achieves zero-downtime, scalable sensor data flow during peak events with ScaleArc

Sixgill Taps ScaleArc to Keep Sensor Data Flowing During Peak Events

Sixgill is a Santa Monica–based technology company that delivers a mobile proximity platform to collect and analyze sensor-generated IoT data for location-based alerts and real-time engagement at large events. Running on AWS to leverage elastic compute, Sixgill faced a critical challenge: while compute could be scaled up quickly, their MySQL database became a bottleneck during peak, short-duration events, causing queued requests and occasional timeouts.

Sixgill deployed ScaleArc’s database load‑balancing software, which transparently optimizes SQL traffic, manages queues, and provides app‑transparent failover across AWS zones without code changes. The solution handled extreme event loads (e.g., the Rugby World Cup) with zero downtime, giving Sixgill confidence to support larger instances, reduce risk, and save money by avoiding unnecessary capacity purchases while improving uptime and scalability.

Sixgill

John Dohm

CTO