GRIDSCALE
A place for everything, --especially xkoto’s GRIDSCALE database virtualization
Wednesday, December 17, 200802:20 pm EDT
Vertica’s founder, Mike Stonebraker, had some interesting observations about the database world, and more specifically Oracle, in this interview. As one of the industry’s pioneers, he takes some jabs at Oracle RAC and the company’s monolithic view of data, which he calls their “one size fits all” assertion. In the past, I have weighed in on the downsides of RAC’s shared everything approach, but I’ll let Mike’s observations on the inherent scalability limitations speak for me this time.
Clearly, one size does not fit all. For example, innovative Column databases such as Vertica have significant advantages in many of the analytics-heavy use cases that make them shine. Mainstream row-oriented databases are particularly useful for those relational join gymnastics required by reporting and decision support. Oracle’s Exadata, Microsoft’s DATAllegro, and IBM’s Balanced Warehouse advance the cause of data warehouse appliances. Each technology has its place—one size does not fit all.
There is also an important place for our GRIDSCALE database virtualization product. Today I was speaking to one of the world’s biggest ISVs in the telco OSS space, which is weighing how to address the need to improve database access for its data-intensive applications. This is that important place for xkoto’s GRIDSCALE database virtualization software. We see GRIDSCALE as the database “shim” that allows an application provider to turn its single instance database into an active/active database pool without a major coding exercise for the ISV. This way, the ISV can focus on its strengths and leverage xkoto’s strengths as a software appliance in its stack. A place for everything and everything in its place.
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xkoto GRIDSCALE - A New and Better Way to Provide Database Disaster Recovery
Friday, December 05, 200802:12 pm EDT
Day 3 at the 2008 Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas - crowds are becoming predictably thinner as the week progresses and even as each hour progresses, although some sessions focused on critical issues such as disaster recovery are still packing them in. I heard one attendee complaining about how many miles he had to walk to get from his hotel to the conference - one of the hazards of being in the land of the mega-hotels.
I was on my way to the final session of the day, 4:45-5:45pm, looking for the location for “The Impact of Virtual Technology on Vendor Licensing” (something that strikes fear in the hearts of legacy software vendors); as I turned the corner I came upon a line about 40 people deep. Fearing that this was the lineup for my session I went to the front of the line and saw the display with the name of the session: “Data Replication Architectures for Disaster Recovery.” Suddenly curious, I ditched my designated session and joined the long queue.
The room filled with more than 200 people, standing room only - must be giving away a car or something big is what I reasoned - wrong, no giveaway. Instead, I discovered that these attendees all had a lot of pain around replication. Gartner analyst Stanley Zaffos laid out the strengths/weaknesses of the basic types of replication - server, application, database, storage, and network-based. In a poll of the audience, 35% rely on storage based replication, likely because of they want a mature solution to support disaster recovery. On the downside, Zaffos pointed out that storage based replication (like EMC SRDF) is expensive, consumes a lot of bandwidth, and suffers from vendor lock-in.
After the session, it was crystal clear to me how xkoto GRIDSCALE offers a new, practical, effective solution to the DR problem. As a database virtualization solution, it does not fit nor require traditional database log shipping replication or application replication. As a software appliance, it often does not require much change to the software stack (i.e. the application or the database), unlike server-based replication. It is storage-agnostic like network-based replication. GRIDSCALE provides a new and better way to solve an old and vexing problem.
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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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xkoto Wins InformationWeek 500 Startup City Competition
Monday, September 22, 200805:43 pm EDT
It’s my great pleasure to share with you that last week xkoto was chosen as the winner of the InformationWeek 500 Startup City competition, following a six-company shootout at the prestigious annual event. We presented to over 200 CIOs and IT executives and to a panel of CIO judges, who chose GRIDSCALE for its ability to solve key business challenges for today’s mission-critical database applications.
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