Sybase’s data management strategy has always been a little different from the rest of the industry, geared more towards building best in class databases for certain categories rather than a one-size fits all approach. Following that path, Sybase has now announced the availability of Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Cluster Edition, featuring Virtualized Resource Management (VRM) technology that reduces the complexity of deploying a database application across a shared disk server cluster.
Modern enterprises are faced with conflicting IT challenges. Data centers often run out of physical space—no more space for hardware and maxed out power grids–not to mention the inability to cool the hardware. The solution would seem to be to reduce the amount of hardware running in the data center. On the other hand, applications are becoming much more mission critical; business groups and units are demanding higher levels of reliability, availability and continuous operation–demands that require adding more hardware.
With ASE Cluster Edition, you can build a grid of multiple machines that all work within a cluster together, respond to requests uniformly and look like one system, thus protecting your service levels. If a hard disk fails, or something else goes wrong on one of the machines, requests to the failed machine are automatically redirected to the other machines within that cluster.
In addition, ASE Cluster Edition provides the ability to transparently take a machine offline for maintenance, with no impact on the application or responsiveness of the system, by migrating all of the connections off a node and redistributing them to other nodes in the cluster. ASE Cluster Edition’s grid approach and Virtualized Resource Management technology make it easy to protect service levels and different environments whether it’s peak loads, taking machines off for maintenance or node failure.
But what about that IT challenge we mentioned earlier: lack of physical space equals reduce hardware vs. the demand for higher levels of reliability, availability and continuous operation, which equals add more hardware.
A key benefit of ASE Cluster Edition is Virtualized Resource Management. This new technology, which has five patents pending, allows you to create multiple virtual clusters on top of one physical cluster. Each of those virtual clusters can handle all of the requests for an application or workload, and each can have resources from the physical cluster assigned to it. In addition, each virtual cluster has its own failover capability, its own rules to deal with failover, its own rules to deal with load balancing, etc.
Often, enterprises will have applications or workloads running on machines, but will not be utilizing all of the resources on that machine, resulting in redundant hardware or resources within the datacenter. Cluster Edition allows you to consolidate applications or workloads onto the cluster thereby maximizing the resources used on a given machine; effectively dealing with the two conflicting demands put on IT groups.
Cluster Edition is now available for ASE 15.0.1 on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (X86_64), SuSE Linux 9, 10 (X86_64), and 64-bit Solaris Sparc 9, 10.
Please visit www.sybase.com/clusters for more information.
