Xkoto releases a new version of its GridScale software for IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server with new clustering technology. The company's technology is also available on Amazon EC2, a move that could help organizations overcome barriers to running in the cloud, officials say.
Database
virtualization vendor Xkoto has its eye on enhancing cloud computing and
cluster management for Microsoft SQL Server and IBM
DB2.
The
company released GridScale 5.1, the latest version of its software, Sept. 29 with
a new cluster management system to improve the performance of transaction
processing applications. For organizations pursuing cloud computing, Xkoto took
the step of making the software available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2), a move that could help push IBM DB2
and Microsoft SQL Server adoption
in
the cloud by allowing enterprises to overcome limitations on server
capacity and a lack of shared storage.
"Stateless
systems like Web and application servers can scale out via traditional
clustering of servers abstracted by a load balancer," Charlie Ungashick, vice
president of marketing at Xkoto. "However, databases are stateful systems ... [and]
public cloud infrastructure lacks the ability to provision shared storage and
high-speed interconnects between virtual machines to support traditional
clustering. GridScale's active-active architecture eliminates these
dependencies, since it load balances database requests to all underlying
databases without these shared resources."
The
emphasis on cluster management and scalability continues with Xkoto's new
Cluster Lock Manager, which operates transparent to applications to isolate and
coordinate row-level transactions across different database servers.
According
to the company, the version for Microsoft SQL Server brings a
shared-nothing
solution to Microsoft's database and features a "driverless" configuration
mode. Through SQL Server's tabular data stream (TDS)
protocol, GridScale is compatible with native SQL Server drivers, such as ADO,
.NET framework and OLE DB. GridScale can now
also simultaneously manage multiple SQL Server instances via tools like SQL
Server Enterprise Manager.
"GridScale
can be a competitive advantage for our mutual customers, and a reliable,
cost-effective alternative for scenarios requiring scale-out solutions,"
said Claude Lorenson, director of SQL Server marketing at Microsoft, in a
statement. "Businesses looking to scale SQL Server should consider GridScale
for mission-critical applications."
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