If you summarize the characteristics of Gridscale, they read as follows:

• Shared Nothing Architecture: Each node in the database cluster operates completely independent of the others, maintaining its own complete and consistent copy of the database instance. This delivers fault tolerance if you configure it sensibly. Also you can implement it all on NAS (which is cheaper per gig than a SAN – in case you didn’t know).
• Continuous Availability: There really is no need to take the “virtual database” out of service for any reason, ever. No back-up window needed – in fact no back-up needed if you configure it that way.
• Geographically Distributed Implementation: Made possible by modern networking technology. But it’s neat because you can replicate to your heart’s content and really balance the workloads. This also gives you very flexible disaster recovery options.
• 100% Data Consistency: This is a product claim. xkoto claims that its technology ensures consistency across all copies. (It’s not hard to do, but it’s not trivial to do without impacting performance.)
• High Performance and Scalable: GRIDSCALE gets the high performance by scaling out. Ultimately you can get the same or better transaction throughput with horizontal scale-out in a shared nothing environment.
• No Application Code Changes: If you’ve got JDBC/ODBC/CLI-compliant applications then there should be no code changes.

Right now GRIDSCALE supports DB2 and its about to release a version that provides the same capabilities for Microsoft SQL Server. The company is exhibiting strong growth and has some A-List clients.

Incidentally, this isn’t so different from the way that Vertica works. My thoughts are that this is how databases will be implemented as time passes. The days of the tight cluster and single database instance are coming to an end.

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