Sanbolic AppCluster enhances Microsoft SQL Server

Sanbolic offers Melio, a family of products, designed to provide the capability to increase database and virtual desktop availability and performance through clustering. Sanbolic is calling this capability AppCluster. This clustering capability is designed to support physical, virtual and both public and private cloud offerings. Recently, the company announced an enhanced Melio module that is designed to manage active-active clusters of  servers supporting Microsoft's SQL Server.

Here's what the company has to say about the announcement:

Sanbolic®, the market leader in data management, today announced the launch of Sanbolic® AppCluster™ support for public clouds. Sanbolic AppCluster, a Microsoft SQL Server specific module within its Melio™ software, extends the agility, high availability (HA), and scalability of SQL Server workloads across physical, virtualized, and now – both private and public cloud environments. With the addition of public cloud support, customers will be able to further minimize the cost and complexity of managing SQL Server clusters, while extending the economics of public cloud to one of the most widely deployed database server and information platforms in the world.

Due to its popularity and rapid deployment, SQL Server sprawl has become a common and significant hurdle to overcome, as well as other associated issues such as poor utilization, added cost and management complexity. And, while SQL Server virtualization can help customers consolidate server instances, it too presents its own set of problems and limitations. Sanbolic’s Melio™ has helped such customers to drastically improve application agility, availability and performance while improving storage utilization and reducing the management cost required to support clustered SQL Server environments.

Now, all of the capabilities that Sanbolic Melio users have benefited from within their private data centers can be enjoyed in the public cloud, along with all of the added advantages a public cloud can provide. Delivered via the world’s most well-known and trusted public cloud providers, Sanbolic AppCluster enables existing enterprise-class clustered SQL Server users to confidently move this area of their IT infrastructure into the public cloud in order to dramatically lower the associated costs and management burden, as well as ensure always-on availability and on-demand scalability. For rapidly growing business organizations, the new service allows them to quickly and affordably access enterprise-class IT infrastructure, which was previously beyond their reach from both an operational and capital expense perspective – thereby helping to level the playing field between their company and larger more established competitors, as well as re-focus the highly valuable time and expertise of their IT organization on activities that directly contribute to the bottom-line, speed time-to-market and increase competitive advantage.

Snapshot analysis

Organizations wishing to deploy database-based applications in a number of environments to increase levels of scaleability, availability and to create viable disaster recovery plans face significant challenges.

Microsoft's SQL Server, like many traditional SQL databases, was designed with a static physical host configuration in mind. Moving instances around to create a dynamic environment that includes physical, virtual and both public and private clouds can be quite challenging. Both product configuration and licensing issues get in the way. This leads to organizations to deploy more instances of the database than might be required.

Sanbolic is addressing this issue using a combination of its technologies including its Melio FS, a clustered file system and its LaScala, volume manager to create a .NET-based Windows service. This service works with Windows SQL Management Studio to create a clustering solution.

If this approach appears to solve your company's database challenges, it would be worth seeing a demo.