Feature Story

April 29, 2008 — The rule of thumb for service-level availability is that for every "nine" you add to the required uptime, costs increase by an order of magnitude. Yes, you can have five-nines availability (99.999%)-if you can afford it.

A new shared-disk cluster implementation for Sybase Adaptive Server (ASE) changes the equation. Sybase ASE Cluster Edition introduces new capabilities for pushing system uptime toward 100% with automatic failover-while saving on system, power consumption, and administrative costs. Sun's 64-bit Solaris Operating System is the first UNIX OS to be supported, and ASE Cluster Edition is ideal for using Sun's multi-core and multi-node systems with Sun storage networking solutions.

For financial services organizations and other companies with high volumes of transactions and extremely high service-level availability requirements, Sybase ASE running on Sun SPARC systems represents a true breakthrough.

Multiple Applications, One Installation

The Sybase ASE Cluster Edition Virtualized Resource Management technology and logical clusters allow IT departments to easily operate multiple applications on a single installation. Each logical cluster is a set of ASE server instances with its own dedicated physical resources and its own load balancing and failover rules. Workloads and applications are assigned to a logical cluster to maximize workload performance and availability.

By using ASE Cluster Edition across Sun nodes with a shared Storage Area Network, companies can protect service levels from failures, peak load bottlenecks, and downtime for maintenance tasks. Administrators use the Workload Manager in ASE Cluster Edition to set up logical clusters running on different nodes and assign workloads and applications to it. In the event of a node failure within a logical cluster, the workload is automatically transferred to remaining nodes-transparently to the application using failover rules defined by the administrator. Load balancing can also be performed transparently, including bringing standby nodes online to protect service levels during peak loads. This transparent load balancing supports migrating nodes offline at scheduled times for maintenance, without impacting the availability of applications.

Optimized Resource Utilization and Lower Costs

The combination of Sun SPARC servers and Sybase ASE Cluster Edition also maximizes resource utilization by helping to consolidate underutilized servers. IT departments can save on system, power consumption, and administration costs by reducing the number of separate servers, and they can incrementally add new system resources and ASE server instances to logical clusters as needed. Sybase ASE Cluster Edition also maximizes the effectiveness of database server administration by managing all of server resources required for a workload through a single logical cluster rather than having to manage each individual database server instance.

With Sybase ASE Cluster Edition, IT Departments can also save money by augmenting or replacing large, expensive legacy servers with a grid of lower cost Sun SPARC nodes. This can reduce the capital and maintenance costs while increasing the compute power and flexibility to support new database workloads and service levels. When combined with Virtualized Resource Management technologies and logical clustering, it also reduces the impact and cost of planned maintenance and system upgrades.

Sun and Sybase: 20 Years of Success in Financial Services

Sybase is the largest global enterprise software company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information from the data center to the point of action. And Sun is one of Sybase's longest-running partners, with a strong relationship built over the past two decades. Sybase and Sun have been extremely successful working on Wall Street together. They built early successes helping financial services customers implement Sybase on Sun for highly reliable high performance transaction processing trading systems into global businesses serving many market segments. Sybase develops new products using Sun as a core development and deployment platform. Sybase and Sun continue to have close ties across engineering, marketing and sales to support their many joint customers worldwide.

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