10gen, the company commercializing MongoDB, and SoftLayer, the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider in the world, have just launched MongoDB Cloud Subscriptions.

It's a unique pay-as-you-go managed cloud subscription pushing certified pre-engineered and orchestrated MongoDB systems through a highly scalable, automated cloud platform.

The idea is to make the open source NoSQL database more available through the push-button provisioning of high-performance, production-grade, highly scalable clusters at SoftLayer's portal or API.

It's supposed to be easy to buy and promises ease of management, administration and support.

The widgetry on offer will be three single-tenant configurations of dedicated bare metal outfitted with the 10gen's MongoDB database - simply designated small, medium and large. They vary in disk and memory and are expected to be used as on-demand Big Data solutions.

It starts with entry-level quad-core servers and moves up to 16-core computing nodes, all available in real-time. These Big Data deployments can be fully integrated with other SoftLayer infrastructure solutions such as secure intra-architecture and inter-data center connectivity via its global private network.

The scheme provides unified monthly billing and requires no long-term contracts. SoftLayer will handle unlimited first-line 24x7 phone and web support, emergency patches and the commercial licenses.

Prices start at $359 per-month and at $659 per-month with a MongoDB Cloud Subscription. It includes an Intel Xeon 1270-based server with 8GB of RAM and two 500GB of SATA storage drives. Broadband is essentially free.

The companies collaborated on engineering the systems to ensure they consisted of optimized hardware and OS configurations, automated deployment of multi-data center clusters, and integrated monitoring and support.

Until another service provider does the same thing SoftLayer has an exclusive on the arrangement.

10gen CTO Eliot Horowitz says, "Our aim is to deliver MongoDB to the masses."

SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda says, "We've taken the guesswork out of deploying and managing Big Data solutions." The company figures it's creating the perfect platform for companies that rely on Big Data.

MongoDB was built in 2009 to bridge the gap between relational database management systems (RDBMS) and key-value stores. Instead of storing data in tables and rows, it stores data in documents with dynamic schemas.

Thousands of organizations use MongoDB for operational intelligence, content management, product data management, high-volume data feeds, user data management and Hadoop.

SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. It spans 13 data centers in the US, Asia and Europe with a global footprint of network points-of-presence. It claims to have 100,000 servers under management.

According to the Wall Street Journal even in the early stages companies that use Big Data effectively get about a 6% productivity improvement versus those that don't.