xkoto (www.xkoto.com), the database virtualization company, today announced a partnership with Scalability Experts focused on creating and delivering GRIDSCALE-based solutions for high-availability and scale-out to the SQL Server market.

A recognized leader in providing educational and consulting services to mid-sized businesses and large enterprises, Scalability Experts has more than 1,000 customers in 25 countries. The company will work with xkoto to provide solutions for businesses implementing high availability and multi-server deployments of SQL Server using GRIDSCALE. In addition, the companies will work together to cultivate new opportunities in the SQL Server market.

“Our customers are continually striving to meet service level agreements and to improve the operational efficiency of their critical business applications,” said Robert Beatty, Senior Vice President, Scalability Experts. “Our SQL Server expertise and proven methodologies, combined with GRIDSCALE’s feature set, will enable businesses to eliminate downtime for key applications and dramatically reduce operating costs in the data center.”

Named Best of Tech•Ed 2009 for Database Administration, GRIDSCALE provides advanced clustering software for SQL Server. GRIDSCALE distributes application load across multiple instances of SQL Server running anywhere on the network. With GRIDSCALE, businesses can improve application performance, achieve continuous availability for business-critical applications, and implement cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. For more information about GRIDSCALE, visit http://www.xkoto.com/gridscale.

Released in September, GRIDSCALE 5.1 is the latest version of xkoto’s active-active solution for Microsoft SQL Server. GRIDSCALE 5.1 adds several features that enhance the performance and capabilities of the industry’s first shared-nothing solution for SQL Server, including native driver support and a new Cluster Lock Manager.

“Scalability Experts’ experience and success will provide a major boost to our efforts to penetrate the SQL Server market,” said David Patrick, President and CEO, xkoto. “This partnership will help deliver to our customers the end-to-end solutions they need for their most critical SQL Server database projects.”