Businesses today continue to grapple with an age-old problem: how to deliver non-stop access to business-critical data. Application downtime can have a significant impact on your business – loss in revenue, lower employee productivity, regulatory fines and worse, damage to your corporate brand.

Most organizations use costly, isolated or clustered SMP boxes to provide some measure of availability. Unfortunately these “high availability” technologies were designed for fail-over, not 24x7 availability. They do not allow IT operations to perform maintenance on their databases without downtime. As a result, IT organizations are forced to maintain expensive active-passive systems and resort to planned downtime to keep databases up-to-date.

With GRIDSCALE from xkoto, you escape the limitations of today’s active-passive database environments by virtualizing your database infrastructure. GRIDSCALE uses patent-pending technology to enable commercial off-the-shelf databases to run on a cluster of commodity systems with the same or better reliability and performance as much more expensive proprietary systems.
Since GRIDSCALE is an active-active solution, all the servers in the grid are accessible, fully utilized and can be dispersed geographically to mitigate disaster scenarios.

"GRIDSCALE allows us to use low-cost hardware, maintain application uptime, scale with increasing user load and replicate to our disaster recovery site. It also enables flexibility with job execution and backup processes that is not possible with base DB2. "
- Ryan Lane, Genworth Financial -

"Storage replication issues go back 30 years. xkoto's innovation was to look at the same problem everyone else was seeing, but rather than look at the output side, ask, ' What if we looked at the input side; what's going into the database?' [This simple idea] is diabolically clever.”
- Dan Kusnetzky, Kusnetzky Group -

GRIDSCALE for DB2 is officially supported by IBM. As a business running GRIDSCALE with DB2, you'll have one-stop, 24/7 support from IBM and the convenience and confidence of having a single-point of contact for support issues.

  

GRIDSCALE is middleware which runs between your applications and your databases. They connect to GRIDSCALE as they would any standard database without modification. GRIDSCALE virtualizes the data infrastructure, so whether the copies of data are local or dispersed across multiple data centers in different cities, applications get consistent data reliably and quickly.

CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY: By sharing the load across multiple servers, the loss of any one server does not have an impact on the availability of the service. In addition, since servers can be taken off-line without impact, you can also perform rolling upgrades on the DB2 servers for true continuous availability.

HORIZONTAL SCALABILITY: Performance tests show that with each new GRIDSCALE server, application performance can increase up to 85%. As a result, instead of architecting and expensing a fully loaded database solution to handle peak demand from the outset, GRIDSCALE allows you to control when to add capacity, depending on your changing business needs.

DATA INTEGRITY: Standard asynchronous transaction replication solutions cannot load balance requests across all nodes since they cannot guarantee data consistency across nodes. Central to GRIDSCALE is its innovative, patent-pending algorithm used to ensure that all returned data is consistent.

NO APPLICATION CODE CHANGES: To take advantage of GRIDSCALE, JDBC, ODBC and DB2 CLI compliant applications typically require no code changes in the application or to the underlying database definition. xkoto also provides an assessment service that can be used to quickly identify any additional configuration information required to handle special cases.

SPANS MULTIPLE DATA CENTERS: With GRIDSCALE, there is no more need for expensive and intensive data replication strategies between production and DR sites. GRIDSCALE allows customers to solve both HA and DR issues with a single solution. Using a highly efficient communication protocol, GRIDSCALE allows database servers to span multiple, geographically dispersed data centers. As a result, you can load balance across multiple data centers, tap into idle capacity at disaster recovery (DR) sites and ensure that your DR database is always up-to-date.

EASY-TO-USE, COMPREHENSIVE MANAGEMENT: GRIDSCALE’s Web-based management console provides straightforward management and administration of GRIDSCALE and database servers. Diagnostic and fault event notification for GRIDSCALE and the underlying managed environment can be forwarded to an enterprise management system for processing.