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Active-Active Clustering for SQL Server
Microsoft SQL server is widely deployed as a cost effective database platform, but it is less frequently found in large enterprise installations. Ongoing enhancements to the SQL Server platform and the x86 platform it runs on are closing the gap with Oracle’s solutions. Sanbolic’s Melio Data Center Product Suite add additional functionality to SQL Server deployments that further enhances the functionality of SQL Server deployments relative to Oracle.
Storage Management for SQL Sever Deployments
Sanbolic’s Data Center Product Suite provides storage management features comparable to Oracle ASM for SQL Server. SAN Storage can be centrally configured into logical volumes and assigned to SQL Servers. Multiple tiers of storage can be flexibly managed. Sanbolic’s LaScala clustered volume manager (included in the product suite) enables aggregation of the performance of multiple storage controllers into a single volume. Logical storage volumes and its file system can be expanded dynamically, either by growing the LUN on the storage array, or by incorporating additional LUNs into the storage volume. RAID1 (software mirroring) functionality is also available within the volume manager.
Melio clustered file system (included in the product suite) allows multiple SQL instances to mount a shared LUN containing multiple databases concurrently. Using this “active-active” storage resource, large SQL clusters can easily be configured using our AppCluster product, and databases can be quickly moved between SQL instances for load balancing or failover.
Melio includes VSS-based distributed snapshot capability. It also incorporates a full set of performance monitoring tools. Quality of Service to can be prioritized by SQL instance if storage bandwidth is congested.
Sanbolic Melio Data Center Suite can be used to provide a shared LUN for Hyper-V virtual machines, supporting Live Migration and enabling significantly improved I/O performance to the VMs. SQL Server deployments on Hyper-V running heavy workloads should see large improvements in performance.
Active-Active SQL Clustering
AppCluster is a component of Melio Data Center Suite that provides solution for managing active-active clusters of SQL Servers. 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.
AppCluster 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 virtually transparent active-active clustering solution. It enables databases to be moved very quickly between SQL server instances 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.
The product also removes hardware limitations imposed by current clustering platforms and allows users not only to mix different hardware platforms, but also mix hardware and virtual machines in the same cluster group. In addition by utilizing and benefiting from the active-active shared LUN access provided by Melio product suite, AppCluster eliminates the complexity of configuring and managing existing clustering solutions.
Key Advantages of AppCluster:
- Support for large cluster sizes
- Can support 100’s of nodes in the same cluster limited only by hardware
- Faster failover times for minimum downtimes
- Database consolidation and migration capability
- Failover environment can be set up in minutes
- Supports configuration of database grouping and dependency
- Virtual and physical machines can be mixed in the same cluster
- Native support for SQL Management Studio
- Ability to scale number of nodes and storage dynamically while active I/O is present
For more information:
sales@sanbolic.com or call +1 617 833 4242. |
