Xkoto

Analysis of clustering technology vendor Xkoto and its Gridscale product line. Related subjects include:

Clustering

July 31, 2010

Teradata, Xkoto Gridscale (RIP), and active-active clustering

Having gotten a number of questions about Teradata’s acquisition of Xkoto, I leaned on Teradata for an update, and eventually connected with Scott Gnau. Takeaways included:

Teradata is discontinuing Xkoto’s existing product Gridscale, which Scott characterized as being too OLTP-focused to be a good fit for Teradata. Teradata hopes and expects that existing Xkoto Gridscale customers won’t renew maintenance. (I’m not sure that they’ll even get the option to do so.)
The point of Teradata’s technology + engineers acquisition of Xkoto is to enhance Teradata’s active-active or multi-active data warehousing capabilities, which it has had in some form for several years.
In particular, Teradata wants to tie together different products in the Teradata product line. (Note: Those typically all run pretty much the same Teradata database management software, except insofar as they might be on different releases.)
Scott rattled off all the plausible areas of enhancement, with multiple phrasings – performance, manageability, ease of use, tools, features, etc.
Teradata plans to have one or two releases based on Xkoto technology in 2011.

Frankly, I’m disappointed at the struggles of clustering efforts such as Xkoto Gridscale or Continuent’s pre-Tungsten products, but if the DBMS vendors meet the same needs themselves, that’s OK too.

The logic behind active-active database implementations actually seems pretty compelling: Read more