Databases Toolkit

Sybase releases virtualised disk cluster tool

Adrian Bridgwater ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 20 Feb 2008 11:06 GMT

Sybase has introduced a cluster edition of its Adaptive Server Enterprise relational database-management system with virtualisation technology for deployments across shared disk server clusters.

Announced on Tuesday, the new edition is designed to manage high workloads, such as online transaction processing or VLDB (very large database) systems, which should help to improve utilisation rates for database administrators trying to cut costs and maintain high availability, according to Sybase.

The company's patented Virtualized Resource Management technology provides administrators with a virtual view of the physical disk cluster that handles application workloads. It then allows workloads to be dynamically changed on demand so that installation, configuration and maintenance of the system can be carried out more easily.

"IT departments that use ASE [Adaptive Server Enterprise] Cluster Edition to improve application service levels or reduce the number of existing database servers can do so without changes to an application's business logic, because the cluster appears as a single server to the application," said David Jonker, senior product marketing manager for Sybase's ASE Group.

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"System failover and failback happens transparently, so developers implementing applications with ASE Cluster Edition do not need to write extensive business logic to handle the details of these occurrences, as is normally seen with most clustering approaches," added Jonker.

At a time when SLAs (service-level agreements) for database providers are increasingly demanding, clustered server computing offers the option to improve hardware utilisation by consolidating database workloads onto a smaller number of machines. Clusters also provide the option to implement a data grid system with reduced infrastructure costs by replacing expensive high-end hardware with a grid of low-cost servers that still delivers the same service levels.

Cluster Edition is now available for ASE 15.0.1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (x86_64), Suse Linux 9, 10 (x86_64), and 64-bit Solaris Sparc 9 and 10.

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