To many of us today, the “cloud” seems like a bit of magic. We often simply use the services of a cloud based system without really thinking about where the cloud is located, or who keeps it running. Ultimately, behind every “cloud”, there are real people managing real machines. What is marketed as a “cloud” is really a rack of machines, with a very real person who has to keep them running. To that person; the administrator, the “cloud” isn’t “in the cloud”, it’s in his own data center! The administrator must put together a set of machines, software and administrative tools that enable everything to be viewed in a completely hands-off way by the users, so that they think of it as a “cloud”.
The challenge vendors face when trying to market and sell something for “the cloud” is that the definition of “the cloud” is so broad and varied. What passes as the cloud to one person is simply a set of machines to another person. Our new SQL Anywhere OnDemand Edition (code named “Fuji”) currently in beta test, is one such product designed to help the administrator of those machines to create a data cloud. While the administrator certainly will know what machines are in use, where the database servers are running and where the databases are located, the end user will be enabled to simply view their database as “being in the cloud”.
The administrator of the cloud system will use one of the primary components of Fuji: the administrative console. The console is designed to enable an administrator to easily keep track of the various “host” machines that are part of the system, the SQL Anywhere servers that are running on each host, and the databases being served by each database server. The console also provides access to all the various tasks that an administrator might want to execute on their running cloud; including starting and stopping database servers, adding a new database into the cloud, setting up high-availability for a database, and backup/restore operations. The console is completely web-driven, so it can be accessed using a standard Flash-enabled web browser.
You can find out more about Fuji and try it out yourself. Take part in the Beta program by signing up on the Fuji Beta Web site.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Randall Jordan // Oct 24, 2011 at 10:40 am
So where is Sybase ASE? Why isn’t Sybase in the Cloud?
2 Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering // Oct 24, 2011 at 11:59 am
@Randall: SQL Anywhere OnDemand is being developed primarily to enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to more easily manage and deploy multi-tenant, hosted applications. It is based on SQL Anywhere Server, one of the leading databases for ISV applications today. It is being developed FOR the ISVs that are looking to host databases in a cloud environment. Certainly, Sybase ASE could be used by customers looking to implement a more traditional Shared Schema type of cloud offering.
3 Randall Jordan // Oct 25, 2011 at 3:03 pm
The only trouble is, you are years late to the party. I’m in the middle of converting a major Sybase ASE installation into MySQL, that is already in the Amazon RDS cloud. Using a stepping stone of Sybase ASE running on an Amazon EC2 instance (elastic Computing) Cloud. A place Sybase should have been back in 2009 when they announced ‘Cloud’ support.
4 Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering // Oct 26, 2011 at 5:50 am
@Randall: It is unclear if the multi-tenant capabilities of SQL Anywhere OnDemand Edition are what you require. If you do require the multi-tenant support that we are offering, then I would encourage you to at least have a look at what we are offering. As an example, the short video demonstration on our Fuji Beta Web site may give you a better idea if SQL Anywhere OnDemand may be an alternative option.
Also, while we have not yet released pricing details, we certainly do plan to offer what I will call “cloud appropriate” pricing models.
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