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SQL Server

Amazon EC2 Now With Beta Support for Windows

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Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on Amazon EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

With over two years of operation and many highly-requested features added, Amazon EC2 is today exiting its beta into general availability and offering customers a Service Legal Agreement (SLA). The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 day period, or customers are eligible to receive service credits back. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.

xkoto Debuts GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server

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xkoto, the database virtualization company, today announced GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server, a product that improves application performance, scalability and reliability in SQL Server environments.

GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server is an active-active solution that virtualizes the database infrastructure. It enables businesses to distribute application loads horizontally across multiple instances of SQL Server, resulting in better reliability and performance than that of more costly and complex legacy clustering solutions. With GRIDSCALE for SQL Server, businesses can eliminate planned and unplanned outages, rapidly scale application load across SQL Servers, and implement cost-effective disaster recovery solutions.

With GRIDSCALE, database administrators can perform hardware upgrades and software updates without having an impact on system performance or uptime. Plus, GRIDSCALE eliminates the limitations of clustering configurations, such as shared storage, partitioning and mirroring.
xkoto underwent performance and functional testing of GRIDSCALE for SQL Server in one of Microsoft’s technology centers. Results showed near-linear scalability for read-intensive workloads, such as those used for online commerce applications. GRIDSCALE also received high marks on availability tests, which simulated hardware failures, network outages and site-wide disaster.
Unlike traditional clustering, which relies on multiple databases tied to shared storage, GRIDSCALE employs a shared-nothing architecture with a dynamic number of database servers for continuous availability. Each database server operates completely independent of the others, maintaining its own complete and consistent copy of the database. The GRIDSCALE server appears as a single, fully functional database to all applications, which are unaware that any one of several database servers may be used to fulfill their requests.
GRIDSCALE for SQL Server initially supports ODBC, JDBC, and .NET connectivity. In addition to its support for SQL Server, xkoto added functionality for DB2 in the latest version 4.1 version of GRIDSCALE.
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