Sanbolic AppCluster 2.0

The folks at Sanbolic recently announced AppCluster Version 2.0, an enhancement to its Melio™ Enterprise software that is focused on extending Microsoft SQL Sever. The goal was increasing the products overall availability, scalability, reliability and make SQL Server-based applications more agile. Tall order indeed.

Here's what Sanbolic has to say about AppCluster Version 2.0

Sanbolic®, a market leader in distributed data management, today announced the launch of AppCluster version 2.0 (v2.0) – a Microsoft SQL Server specific module within its Melio™ Enterprise software that extends the agility, high availability (HA), and scalability of SQL Server workloads across physical, virtualized, and cloud environments.

AppCluster v2.0 enhancements include:

• Storage Live Migration – Live migration of data within and across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments, for consolidation or to move from proof of concept (PoC) to production, with no downtime or disruption in service.
• Dynamic Load Balancing – Automatic or directly managed distribution of workload across all heterogeneous physical and virtual storage assets, for enhanced capacity management, optimization, and performance.
• Individual Database Quality of Service (QoS) – Automated, policy-based management that identifies performance bottlenecks in real-time and reallocates resources to meet change in demand, thereby ensuring high availability and peak application performance.

The new AppCluster software module was created to address the challenges countless data centers face today due to the continuing proliferation of SQL Server deployments. For these organizations, database consolidation has become a high-value and high-priority undertaking – and customers require an efficient and cost-effective solution.

Snapshot Analysis

Sanbolic took on the challenge of placing Microsoft's SQL Server into an artificial environment so that multiple instances of the database could be executing at the same time and be treated as a single database instance.  Although the company doesn't use this catch phrase, what it is doing could be considered "database virtualization." While Microsoft has offered Microsoft Cluster Service in Windows Server for a number of product generations, Sanbolic's approach offers significantly more flexibility.

Sanbolic's approach allows SQL Server to be migrated across a number of systems. Workload requests can be balanced across a number of SQL Server instances to increase both scalability and performance. Sanbolic's approach even makes it possible to apply specific service level metrics to SQL Server instances.

Sanbolic has developed technology that is both clever and useful. If your organization is using Microsoft's SQL Server and you're not entirely pleased with the product's performance, scalability or reliability, it would be worth the time to see a demo.