Database Vendor Enhances Clustering for IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server

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."