Sanbolic AppCluster to Manage Active-Active Clusters of SQL Servers

Sanbolic, Inc. announced AppCluster, a solution for managing active-active clusters of SQL Servers, virtual machines and other resources in conjunction with Sanbolic’s clustered file system, Melio FS. This new product provides ease of management, high availability, very fast failover, and load balancing of multiple physical or virtual SQL servers accessing a single SAN LUN containing multiple data stores.
 
The Sanbolic solution supports SQL 2008 Enterprise, as well as clustering virtual hard disks and other resources. The product utilizes the active-active storage access provided by Melio file system and LaScala volume manager, so that all database servers can concurrently mount a shared LUN. The number of machines in the cluster can be dynamically expanded, and storage volumes can be dynamically expanded. The product uses a .NET based windows service, and works in conjunction with Windows SQL Management Studio, providing a virtual transparent active-active clustering solution. It enables databases to be moved very quickly between SQL servers either for availability, or to better match server capacity with workload. Both planned and unplanned migrations of workloads are supported. It can be installed using any industry standard servers running SQL Enterprise together with any industry standard SAN storage.

Sanbolic’s Melio clustered file system and LaScala clustered volume manager allow multiple servers to have concurrent read/write shared access to a SAN volume, while utilizing full performance of the SAN hardware. Sanbolic has optimized the lock architecture of Melio to enable block objects such as databases and virtual machine files to have direct I/O access to SAN storage resources. Melio and LaScala install easily on physical or virtual servers, and can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI SAN.

Sanbolic software currently supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, including Server Core, Windows Server 2008 R2, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2. Sanbolic distributes its product solutions worldwide through a network of distributors, OEMs, VARs and system integrators.

Sanbolic will be exhibiting at Microsoft TechEd in Los Angeles May 11-14, and at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans July 13-16.