ASE Cluster Edition Released
February 21, 2008 8:45 AM
Filed Under: Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Clusters Linux Sybase News
On Tuesday, we announced the release of Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition (I will call it ASE CE going forward). See this link for the press release.
Speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek, ASE CE may well be be the worst kept secret at Sybase (remember, we've been talking about and showing the product off at TechWave for the last few years). Since TechWave 2006 when Rob V showed off ASE CE for the first time, there has been a large amount of interest and buzz at customer sites about when the product would be released, what it would be capable of, and would it truly be as easy to use as we say it is. Well, it's out now, customers can try it out and I can blog about it (to be honest, I've been wanting to blog about it for months now but I've kept my mouth closed and my fingers away from the keyboard, and that's why you haven't seen many blog postings from me).
I've had different builds and betas installed on my home machine since last summer (yep, I built out a home cluster. The local power company just LOVES me) and have been playing with the product for quite awhile now. As far as the ease of use goes, I can definitely say YES the administration of the cluster is dead simple. I built my very first cluster in just a few minutes. Surprised? Well, before you start saying things like "you've got inside help and knowledge of the product", let me tell you this. I taught an internal class back in December and had each and every one of them install ASE CE too. Guess what? They had it up and running in short order as well. So see? Setting up a cluster should NOT be hard, and ASE CE makes it simple. Once you get the cluster up and running, then configuring workload management, logical clusters, client routing and redirection ... it's all done with a few stored procedures. You don't have to code ANYTHING or write complex rules AT ALL. For the faint of heart, you can even do all of this from Sybase Central. Funny story (but true). When we had the internal training session last summer on this product, I didn't listen to *ANY* of the presentations on how to set this thing up, I just download it and installed it at home and I had it up and running in a few hours.
I learn things the hard way. But guess what? It wasn't hard. Does it get any easier than that? I think not.
Some questions have come from the newsgroups about ASE CE. Right now there isn't a Developer Edition or Express Edition of the product yet, and to be honest I'm not sure when or if that will happen. If that changes, I'll post something here. Also, right now the product only runs on Solaris and Linux, but other platforms will follow in the future.
Watch this space, I've been working 100% of the time on ASE CE since mid-December and will be blogging on it quite a bit over the coming months. I'm getting ready to start a few proof-of-concepts out at some client sites, so I'm pretty excited about that. Also, a few people in my group are working on some whitepapers about ASE CE, so expect those to be posted on sybase.com soon.
It's a great day for ASE at Sybase.
Until next time,
--Chris
Posted by Chris Brown on February 21, 2008 8:45 AM
Comments
Vasudeva Kotti email -
Nice article. Will be waiting for the proof-of-concepts articles.
As you mentioned I have been working with Sybase Products since 1997, Sybase products are easy to install, easy to configure, easy to troubleshoot. They just work as mentioned in the manuals. It is not the same with other Software Products :)
Thanks
Vasu
TK email -
Couple questions... We are considering building a global cluster for our single production system running on a Sun V480. Can the new Sybase cluster product be used? Could we use something like Veritas Cluster Server and Volume Replicator?
