GRIDSCALE ON Demand
Thursday, August 21, 200803:24 pm EDT
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Derrick Harris, Editor of On-Demand Enterprise (formerly GRIDToday). We discussed where database virtualization technologies like GRIDSCALE fit into the overall virtualization landscape. We also touched on some important topics such as the impact of continuous availability for SQL Server applications, our partnerships with IBM and Microsoft, and the need for technologies like GRIDSCALE to make cloud computing applications scale.
Read more here.
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InformationWeek Interview
Friday, August 15, 200804:31 pm EDT
Recently, John Foley, InformationWeek’s editor, was in town and I had the opportunity to speak to him about xkoto and our database virtualization software, GRIDSCALE. Watch it here.
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The Latest Netflix Affliction - A Wake Up Call for Database Protection
Friday, August 15, 200810:58 am EDT
The recent Netflix outage serves as a reminder that IT services are always vulnerable to outages – and Netflix is not alone – just look at other high profile disruptions of late to the likes of Google and others.
With the trend towards virtualization, SaaS, hosting, and now cloud computing, the many upsides of consolidating and centralizing services is countered by its downside – IT outages now can impact many more businesses, applications, and end users.
While the root cause of the current Netflix affliction has not been disclosed, it went down on another occasion due to suspected database woes. The imperative to defend the database with better reliability and performance is more pronounced now that we are in a centralization craze. Solutions like GRIDSCALE provide this type of defense.
We can expect more high profile disruptions – better to be prepared than to have to give rebates to customers, which is what Netflix has offered to do.
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Virtualization 2.0: The Road Not Yet Traveled
Monday, August 11, 200808:29 am EDT
In combination with LinuxWorld, the Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) event just wrapped up this week in San Francisco. The keynotes were all quite memorable. Being a database guy, I listened intently to Mark Sunday, Oracle’s CIO, as he described the dynamic data center he runs. I managed to fire off a question to him during the open Q&A about whether Oracle would run its most critical databases on Oracle VM given that architects are often concerned about performance with the extra hop through the hypervisor. Mark responded that the performance overhead had been benchmarked and was not a big concern. I think this bodes well for more migrations of big (and small) production databases, Oracle or otherwise, onto VMs. I’d be very interested to hear your opinions on whether production databases will live on VMs in any appreciable numbers....
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Red Hat on RAC
Tuesday, July 22, 200808:16 am EDT
Red Hat launched a promotion urging businesses to evaluate its clustering technology over Oracle RAC for high availability (HA) needs. The promotional video is worth watching. It explains how with RAC, costs for a basic two-node cluster can mount to $240,000. Yikes indeed.
At xkoto, we hear from customers who balk at the licensing costs of RAC. But we don’t believe yet another passive clustering solution is necessarily the answer. With database virtualization, you can rapidly provision systems on the fly, leverage existing hardware, and save on both storage and WAN costs. Watch our On Demand Webcast to find out how database virtualization compares to other traditional clustering approaches.
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Database Virtualization Defined
Monday, July 21, 200807:37 am EDT
Passive database fail-over systems may be “good enough” for many businesses applications. However, many IT architects are looking to escape the limitations of traditional database clustering architectures by taking advantage of virtualization. Database virtualization is emerging as a viable approach to traditional clustering.
Database virtualization software such as GRIDSCALE runs between your applications and databases. It manages multiple, active-active database copies running anywhere on the network. The database virtualization software load balances read requests for scalability and performance. Write requests and database changes are simulcast to all databases to keep them in sync. The databases themselves operate completely independently from one another, unaware that they are part of pool of database servers. And the applications typically require little to no modification beyond the use of a special ODBC, JDBC driver which talks to the database virtualization server.
We’ll be using this site to explore how our database virtualization technology, GRIDSCALE, is being used to eliminate database downtime, improve scalability, implement disaster recovery and reduce IT waste. Stay tuned. To find out more, visit our resource center.
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