"Enterprises today are struggling to reduce their infrastructure costs yet at the same time meet high-availability requirements", stated Carl Olofson, research vice president for Information Management and Data Integration, IDC. "Shared-disk cluster architecture helps to meet these key enterprise requirements for mission-critical database applications. Sybase's focus on building in capabilities to reduce IT complexity through a shared-disk cluster architecture to improve system availability and reliability, and to simplify administration will go towards enabling further adoption of this approach."

"ASE Cluster Edition brings unparalleled availability and resource optimization to a database platform already known for its superior performance, reliability and low total cost of ownership", stated Dr. Raj Nathan, chief marketing officer, Sybase. "Customers in areas such as financial services, telecommunications, retail and government have turned to ASE because it handles extreme transactions in OLTP environments ranging from small and mid-sized databases to VLDB systems with rock solid reliability. We are pleased that we've been able to develop ASE Cluster Edition so that our customers, who run some of the world's most critical data, are able to cost-effectively achieve unprecedented service levels."

Several key customers, including some major financial services firms that worked closely with Sybase over the last year, commented on the ease of implementing the ASE Cluster Edition software. With five patents pending, Sybase ASE Cluster Edition's built-in Virtualized Resource Management (VRM) technology provides application workloads with a virtual view of the physical cluster that can be dynamically changed on demand, greatly simplifying the installation, configuration, and maintenance of the system.

Sybase's unique Virtualized Resource Management technology facilitates:

• A logical view of physical cluster resources that makes it possible to easily and dynamically change database resources so that SLAs are met for an application workload;
• The configuration and deployment of workloads across cluster nodes; and,
• Availability of full information about the current state of the physical cluster for assistance and fine tuning of the overall system.

Enterprises can leverage Sybase ASE Cluster Edition to:

• Maintain optimal service levels through system failures, peak loads and downtime for planned maintenance;
• Maximize resource utilization by consolidating database workloads running from underutilized hardware onto a smaller number of machines; and,
• Implement a data grid system by reducing infrastructure costs by replacing expensive, high-end hardware with a Grid of low-cost servers that still delivers the same service levels.