AppCluster

AppCluster - solution for managing active-active clusters of SQL Servers

AppCluster is 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 and volume manager LaScala. 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.This solution 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 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 already shared storage platform provided by the industry proven clustering capability of Melio FS and LaScala, AppCluster completely removes the extreme 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.