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January 21, 2008
Virtualization + Database = Scalability, Availability
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For years, the talk surrounding databases has been about “high availability” and “maximum uptime” -- two terms that connote the inevitability of failure or, at the very least, downtime. Now, however, one lower-case start-up, xkoto, is looking to add a new phrase to the mix: "continuous availability."
Achieving 'Continuous Availability'
Marketed as a database load balancer, xkoto's flagship Gridscale product is a middleware appliance that sits between the application and the database and allows for multiple active copies of the database to run simultaneously, as opposed to traditional high availability or disaster recovery solutions that normally run in an active-passive model. Active copies are updated, and latency is minimized, by Gridscale's method of passing SQL statements between the databases and the application instead of taking the classic replication approaches of scanning for changes to the disk or to the database buffer. Thanks to virtualization, the software touches neither the database nor the application.
The goals in designing Gridscale, says xkoto president and CEO David Patrick, were to solve for two problems: (1) eliminating recovery time associated with failover situations and (2) providing scale to applications by allowing for the addition of commodity hardware. "The concept of failover doesn't even exist anymore," says Patrick. "It's now the concept of continuous availability because you have multiple active copies of the database."
In terms of scalability, Patrick says adding nodes is easy, and additional boxes can be provisioned or de-provisioned as needed -- "basically immediately." IBM experienced performance gains of 85 percent per additional server when it tested Gridscale, and the xkoto Web site suggests that "upwards of 30 nodes can be clustered while still delivering horizontal scalability." Additionally, Patrick noted, "you can basically have an active database anywhere in the world," as the only geographical limitations have to do with the physics of transmitting information over long distances, not with the Gridscale software. According to Patrick, several customers already have Gridscale databases located around the country.
The solution was designed to work with, and currently only officially supports, IBM's DB2 database, but Patrick says the Gridscale architecture inherently supports other platforms. He added that xkoto is working on a SQL Server edition of Gridscale that should be available later this year.
This notion that Gridscale should be able to support multiple database platforms is particularly captivating to industry analyst and virtualization aficionado Dan Kusnetzky, of the eponymous Kusnetzky Group, who believes that xkoto's attempt to get into the communication stream at a different level than any previous vendors has the potential to produce great benefits. "You could create these database clusters," he said, based on his analysis of the product, "… where either side of the communications architecture was running on entirely different physical systems, or virtual systems, that didn't look anything like the other side, and possibly even running an entirely different database engine."
Who's On Board?
Although start-ups generally experience some difficulty in getting customers on board with their new, and often innovative, products, xkoto has been relatively successful thus far, having notched 15-20 high-profile customers in the 12 months since it really began selling Gridscale. Patrick attributes a good portion of this success to his company's close affiliation with IBM, who has made xkoto part of the sales effort for potential DB2 customers needing the levels of availability and scale Gridscale brings to the table. "IBM has been very, very helpful," said Patrick, adding that he hopes to develop similar relationships with other database vendors as necessary.
Thus far, xkoto's customers are comprised of the usual suspects in high-availability, high-scalability solutions: financial services (Genworth Financial); health care (United Health); online retail (Children's Place); and online travel (Travelport, parent company of Orbitz). The main draw for the early-stage customers, said Patrick, has been the prospect of continuous availability, mostly because cost-analysis of continuous availability is fairly easy and, for certain customers, 100 percent uptime is critical in a world where "people book travel at three in the morning on Sunday night." However, he added, "As we build a bigger customer base, we can refine the scalability part of the story."
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