Dan's Take
Decoupling Databases and Containers From Infrastructure
Examining DxEnterprise's 'Smart Availability' Technology.
- By Dan Kusnetzky
- 09/05/2017
Don Boxley Jr, DH2i's Co-Founder and CEO, recently brought me up to date on what his company is doing with DxEnterprise and to explain the concept of "Smart Availability." DH2i was my Editor's Choice selection for last year for DxEnterprise's ability to enable Microsoft SQL Server-based applications to move freely and transparently among physical, virtual and cloud environments.
DxEnterprise v17 provides what it calls "Smart Availability." This is defined as software that decouples databases and containers from operating system and IT infrastructure, providing workload portability from any host, to any host, anywhere, at any time.
This broad statement is a bit of marketing hyperbole, since DxEnterprise v17 supports only Windows and Linux on industry standard x86-based systems.
DH2i claims that DxEnterprise v17 is designed to "Make infrastructure relevant through InstanceMobility,” defined as a dynamic best execution venue (BEV) workload movement. This software makes it possible for a selection of database engines and Docker containers to be encapsulated to allow migration from one system to another, even though they might be executing on different operating systems.
Dan's Take: Better Living Through Virtualization
One thing that strikes me every time I speak with Boxley is that he and his company are targeting real-world business requirements rather than pursuing an academic dream of a virtual world. In other words, they aren't trying to do everything for everyone, everywhere, always.
The company is strictly applying itself to offering its clients a simple, easy-to-use way to ensure that database and container-based workloads will be reliable and available through monitoring the environment and migrating databases and containers from system to system.
What's new this time is that the company has enhanced its capabilities to allow a larger number of operating systems (Windows and several Linux distributions) to take part in a high availability computing environment. While this environment really doesn't live up to the company's overly-broad statement that it is supporting "workload portability from any host, to any host, anywhere, at anytime," it is tightly targeting important workloads and major platforms.
DH2i hopes that DxEnterprise v17 will be of interest to enterprises using Windows and/or Linux to support database-based workloads, or workloads encapsulated in an operating system virtualization and partitioning (OSVP) computing environment such as Docker. If that describes your organization, DH2i would be a good company to know.
About the Author
Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company.