xkoto, the database virtualization company, today announced GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server, a product that improves application performance, scalability and reliability in SQL Server environments.
GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server is an active-active solution that virtualizes the database infrastructure. It enables businesses to distribute application loads horizontally across multiple instances of SQL Server, resulting in better reliability and performance than that of more costly and complex legacy clustering solutions. With GRIDSCALE for SQL Server, businesses can eliminate planned and unplanned outages, rapidly scale application load across SQL Servers, and implement cost-effective disaster recovery solutions.
With GRIDSCALE, database administrators can perform hardware upgrades and software updates without having an impact on system performance or uptime. Plus, GRIDSCALE eliminates the limitations of clustering configurations, such as shared storage, partitioning and mirroring.
"We are confident that GRIDSCALE for SQL Server will deliver the reliability and performance we require to meet the needs of our new Home Security customers," said Drew DeNardo, Director of IT, InGrid, Inc. "We're using an ASP-based Web store, and if our database is down, that means lost sales. GRIDSCALE for SQL Server is a cost-effective way to give InGrid's e-
commerce engine the same sort of reliability that GRIDSCALE for DB2 has provided for our core Home Security services."
"Traditional database clustering solutions have been proven over the years to deliver availability for mission-critical applications," said Donna Scott, VP, Distinguished Analyst of Gartner, Inc. "However, database virtualization is emerging as a viable alternative to traditional clustering, providing near continuous application availability, seamless failover for unscheduled server downtime, and non-disruptive capacity expansion, and horizontal scaling on reads."
Testing at Microsoft's MTC Lab
xkoto underwent extensive performance and functional testing of GRIDSCALE for SQL Server in one of Microsoft's technology centers. Results showed near-linear scalability for read-intensive workloads, such as those used for online commerce applications. GRIDSCALE also received high marks on availability tests, which simulated hardware failures, network outages and site-wide disaster.
"We're seeing strong demand for customers who want to run critical business applications on commodity systems," said David Patrick, President and Chief Executive Officer, xkoto. "GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server will enable businesses to take SQL Server to the next level of performance and reliability."
How GRIDSCALE Works
Unlike traditional clustering, which relies on multiple databases tied to shared storage, GRIDSCALE employs a shared-nothing architecture with a dynamic number of database servers for continuous availability. Each database server operates completely independent of the others, maintaining its own complete and consistent copy of the database. The GRIDSCALE server appears as a single, fully functional database to all applications, which are unaware that any one of several database servers may be used to fulfill their requests.
"Virtualization is increasingly seen as an important component of an organization's industry standard systems-based solutions," said Dan Kusnetzky, Principal Analyst and President of the Kusnetzky Group LLC and author of Virtually Speaking on ZDnet. "This technology has long been a component of mainframe and midrange systems-based solutions. What xkoto has done is to develop an important new virtualization technology that centers on enhancing the operations of database-based solutions. Organizations looking to optimize the performance, scalability and reliability of these solutions would be well advised to learn more about what xkoto is doing."
GRIDSCALE for SQL Server initially supports ODBC, JDBC, and .NET connectivity. In addition to its support for SQL Server, xkoto added functionality for DB2 in the latest version 4.1 version of GRIDSCALE. For more information on GRIDSCALE 4.1 and SQL Server support, visit
http://www.xkoto.com/products.
Live Webinar Webcast: Database Virtualization for Microsoft SQL Server
To find out more, please attend xkoto's live Webinar October 2, 2008 at 1:00pm ET. Presented by Ariff Kassam, Chief Technology Officer from xkoto, this Webcast provides a technical overview and live demonstration of GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server. Register now at
http://www.xkoto.com/sqlvirtualization.