GRIDSCALE for SQL Server Demo
Thursday, November 20, 200805:08 pm EDT
A number of attendees at SQL PASS asked us where they could see an online demo of GRIDSCALE for SQL Server. I promised to post a link on our blog. Here it is.
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Update from SQL Pass Summt
Thursday, November 20, 200812:05 pm EDT
I attended SQL PASS last year in Denver and this year’s version in Seattle is bigger and better. With the release of SQL Server 2008 this year, there’s more swagger from Microsoft and from many attendees. With the recent acquisition of DATAllegro (great product but everyone here seems to pronounce it differently) it seems like SQL Server is poised to take on bigger challenges, as evidenced by some of the promises of what’s next in Kilimanjaro, the next version of SQL Server due out in 2010.
In the keynote given by Ted Kummert, Microsoft’s Corp. VP for the Data & Storage Platform Division, there was a recurring theme: the database utility. The notion that the database, like the operating system (via virtualization) before it, could be dynamic enough to deliver service on a utility basis is overdue. While Kummert spoke about the next release of SQL Server providing MPP warehouse workloads, self-service BI, management fabrics, and cloud services, these really are key attributes of utility computing: dynamic capacity, self-provisioning, large scale manageability, and service abstraction.
xkoto’s GRIDSCALE database virtualization software fits in well and I daresay will enable more of this transformation. GRIDSCALE takes any number of databases and aggregates them together to distribute load and grow/shrink SQL processing capacity on-demand while hiding these details from applications that think they are directly connecting to a single database. When this dynamic database power is deployed with server virtualization (hypervisors) then the database utility that Kummert proclaimed becomes that much more tangible.
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xkoto at the PASS Summit: Day 1
Wednesday, November 19, 200808:51 pm EDT
Thousands of IT professionals flocked to Seattle for the kickoff of the PASS Summit conference, where xkoto is an exhibitor. Both the turnout and high quality of the conference are impressive.
From an xkoto point of view, we are seeing a great deal of interest in the scale-out and continuous availability options that GRIDSCALE delivers for SQL Server environments. In virtually all of our conversations, the trick has been to “undo” people’s perceptions of traditional shared-disk clustering and show them that there is a much easier way to realize scale-out and continuous availability. Most of these solutions involve replication of a committed transaction from a master database to one or more passive slaves, and result in a complex infrastructure and expensive servers that sit idle. Once we get them to see how GRIDSCALE works – the light goes on and they quickly understand what a cluster of active-active databases can deliver: No need for outages to perform maintenance, scalability for read-intensive workloads, and inexpensive disaster recovery.
We brought GRIDSCALE for SQL Server to market less than two months ago and have seen tremendous interest. The PASS summit continues to build momentum for the product.
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Cast Your Vote for GRIDSCALE Database Virtualization
Wednesday, November 05, 200806:33 pm EDT
GRIDSCALE has been nominated for “Best Virtualization Platforms High Availability” in SYS-CON Virtualization Journal Reader’s Choice Award. We are asking readers to cast a vote for GRIDSCALE as the premier solution to provide business-critical applications access to data for continuous availability.
The link to vote is http://virtualization.sys-con.com/general/vote.htm or just click the banner above. GRIDSCALE is nominated in category 15 and voting ends November 8th. Thank you for voting!
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Don’t Miss xkoto at the Online Virtualization Summit
Monday, November 03, 200805:57 pm EDT
Silicon Valley Watcher was kind enough to invite xkoto to participate in its Virtualization Summit. At this online summit, experts will share information on trends in virtualization, answer questions, and offer strategies and tips to business professionals. Following the featured webcasts, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher will moderate a roundtable discussion with the day's featured speakers to engage in a lively dialogue and answer additional questions from the audience. BrightTALK hosts live webcast summits each week around themes that matter to business professionals. Watch it here...
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Betting on Database Virtualization
Friday, October 31, 200809:12 am EDT
I just returned from the annual IBM Information On Demand conference in Las Vegas where I was able to catch up with a number of our partners and customers - i.e. I was not spending time in the casinos! In my meetings with the top two hypervisor vendors, I was told that more and more customers are migrating their databases to virtual machines. This move is one that I and other virtualization watchers have expected as the inevitable act two, following the very successful initial value proposition of system consolidation. So the database virtualization train has left the station right? Well ... sort of…
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RE: Rap on RAC
Monday, October 20, 200801:23 pm EDT
In Jeff Browning’s Oct. 15, 2008 post, ”To RAC or not to RAC (reprise)”, he compares some performance and cost metrics between a four node Oracle RAC cluster running on physical hardware, and a virtualized Oracle environment under VMware.
It’s not clear how Oracle was configured in the virtual environment, but straight off it’s not hard to compute the cost differences - Oracle RAC is not light on the IT budget. In a shared storage architecture, Oracle RAC costs go even higher if disaster recovery (DR) is factored in - add a replication solution like Oracle DataGuard, replicated SANs, and potentially big WAN pipes and the costs keep shooting up....
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Database Virtualization for SQL Server
Tuesday, October 07, 200809:45 am EDT
Last week xkoto reached a major milestone with the launch of GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server. GRIDSCALE enables IT professionals to avoid the scalability limitations, technical complexity, and costs associated with traditional clustering, mirroring and replication solutions for SQL Server. Ariff Kassam, our CTO and co-founder, gave a presentation and demo of GRIDSCALE at last week’s live Webinar. In case you missed it, you can watch the recorded version anytime here.
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