Update from SQL Pass Summt

Thursday, November 20, 200812:05 pm EDTAlbert Lee

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 EDTCharlie Ungashick

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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Database Virtualization for SQL Server

Tuesday, October 07, 200809:45 am EDTCharlie Ungashick

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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GRIDSCALE ON Demand

Thursday, August 21, 200803:24 pm EDTAlbert Lee

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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