Sanbolic Upgrades AppCluster For SQL Server

VMware Pricing Controversy: Exclusive User Research

Sanbolic, maker of clustered file system and volume management software, today announced that a new version of its AppCluster software, which allows migration of storage across heterogeneous environments, load balancing and quality of service.

AppCluster version 2.0 is a Microsoft SQL Server database specific module for Sanbolic's Melio Enterprise that allows SQL Server to be more highly available and scale across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

AppCluster 2.0, introduced on Monday, now includes the ability to migrate data between environments and storage gear in order to consolidate storage or move from testing and development to production environments without downtime or disrupting access by users. It also allows the IT manager to automatically or manually distribute workloads across the storage nodes in the cluster to increase storage utilization and optimize performance. Finally, AppCluster implements a policy-based management capability that lets IT identify performance bottlenecks and re-assign resources to meet changes in demand.

[ Get the latest on SQL Server. Read Microsoft Revamps SQL Server Licensing. ]

The software enables several capabilities in SQL Server. Among them are hardware abstraction, SQL Server Virtualization, active-active clustering and failover, and centralized management and workflow. By decoupling the SQL Server instances from the physical server and storage bindings, AppCluster is able to achieve hardware abstraction and simplify the management and distribution of workloads. SQL Server virtualization allows the consolidation, protection, and management of SQL Server workload running in virtual machines. Active-active clustering and failover provides shared pools of storage resources where each of the nodes in the pool servers as an active failover for other nodes. This allows SQL Server deployments to be highly available and allows features such as database-level QoS. Further, a centralized management console is available.

Sanbolic was founded in 2000 by CEO Momchil Michailov to provide availabily, scalability, protection, and performance for Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, and Windows file sharing. In addition the company's software supports Citrix XenDesktop, VMware, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

A companion to AppCluster is Melio FS, which comes in several versions. Melio FS is a 64-bit clustered file system that provides multiple servers with simultaneous access to data stored on a storage area network. It supports block-level access to data and storage volumes as large as 18 million terabytes. Using the Melio FS clustered file system, multiple Microsoft Windows Server 2008 servers running on industry-standard x86 servers can be clustered into a common file system on external SAN storage. With this configuration, additional servers and/or storage arrays can be added dynamically to the cluster to expand I/O performance and/or storage capacity when necessary, without I/O interruptions.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.