Enabling the Always-On Enterprise
SQL Server Clustering and Failover
"SQL server proliferation has forced too many organizations down the ugly path of SQL server sprawl. SQL sprawl exponentially increases DBA operational tasks and management to the breaking point. It's become a waking nightmare. Sanbolic's Melio software relieves that stress by consolidating their SQL ecosystem into something far simpler and more manageable."
- Marc Staimer, President and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting.
"Achieving true SQL server consolidation is much more than just virtualized SQL instances. SQL consolidation should also deliver clustering, high availability, and load balancing on top of the newly consolidated footprint. Users that wish to garner the best possible ROI from their SQL environment should look at solutions such as Sanbolic's Melio Enterprise which delivers this functionality embedded in its AppCluster solution."
- Laura DuBois, Program Vice President, Storage Software, IDC.
The Problem
Highly available SQL server clusters continue to be challenging and complex to configure and administer, especially from a storage viewpoint. Multiple storage LUNs need to be created, managed, and protected to enable granular failover of a clustered SQL Server environment. This leads to lower storage utilization, challenges in managing performance in a dynamic environment, and significant management cost. The management is even more complex in mixed deployments of physical and virtual instances.
The Solution
Melio eliminates the complexity of storage management in highly available clustered SQL Server deployments by providing active-active access to a pool of shared storage resources. This simplifies the task of efficiently storing and protecting data, while providing features like database-level QoS to manage performance. Users also have the option to continue to use Windows Failover Clustering to manage resources at the instance level, or use Melio's policy-based clustering service to manage resource at the database level.
Key Benefits
Melio drastically improves storage utilization and reduces the management burden required to support clustered SQL Server environments, while adding additional data protection features and granular performance management capability. Active-active access to storage eliminates the need for "storage silos" and storage failover events. Meanwhile, deployment and management of clustered SQL is simplified with support for heterogeneous operating systems and SQL Server versions.