DH2i announces industry’s first Containers-as-a-Service solution for Microsoft SQL Server

“The idea of ‘containers’ is a much talked about and generally accepted practice in numerous IT environments. However, there remains a number of adoption barriers for IT professionals. These range from a simple lack of understanding to the inability to pursue new technology because higher priority maintenance activities and fire fighting consume so much time. Barriers can also include a general resistance to significant change, budget challenges, and competitive blocks,” said George Crump, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Storage Switzerland.  “By taking DH2i’s container to the cloud, DH2i is overcoming these barriers, and in doing so, providing business organizations with the ability to easily leverage containers and enjoy their benefits.  These include better agility, faster innovation, increased productivity, higher availability and lower costs.”

“As the leading managed cloud company, Rackspace strives to provide customers like DH2i with the expertise and service to manage the backend IT infrastructure, so they can focus on growing and innovating their core business with products like DH2i CaaS,” said Jeff DeVerter, chief technologist for the Microsoft business unit at Rackspace. “With Rackspace support for Microsoft Private Cloud and dedicated servers, Rackspace enables DH2i to seamlessly deliver its container management services to customers. We’re thrilled that DH2i has chosen Rackspace as its trusted infrastructure provider, and we look forward to a continued collaboration.”

“DH2i CaaS for SQL Server enables our customers to fully exploit the cloud’s fractional consumption and predictable scale,” said Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i.  “In traditional cloud deployments, SQL Server often falls victim to sprawl.  Running a 24×7 production environment becomes complicated, SLAs are virtually impossible to deliver, and costs skyrocket.”  He continued, “DH2i CaaS enables customers to bypass internal roadblocks and get their SQL workloads up and running quickly –  spinning up a SQL Server workload in the cloud within hours instead of weeks.  DH2i CaaS offers its InstanceMobility, allowing users to move any SQL Server instance from any host, to any host, anywhere – with near zero downtime; with three-to-four times fewer OSs.  Of course, DH2i CaaS also delivers built-in HA and DR readiness, all at the lowest possible TCO.”  He concluded, “If you’re deploying one SQL instance per virtual machine, its not DH2i CaaS for SQL Server.”

The DH2i CaaS solution, which is ideal for SMB to enterprise customers, leverages DxEnterprise which features a first-of-its-kind container technology that enables workload and data portability and high availability for any SQL Server instance, Windows service or file share. This pioneering container technology creates a framework for orchestrating datacenter management, high availability/disaster tolerance and policy-based SLA management. DxEnterprise is the only Windows container technology that leverages native Windows file system (NTFS) and shared or replicated storage technology to coordinate access to a pool of disk resources in the cluster. This enables consistent disk presentation no matter which host the container is active on. DxEnterprise can support any current version or edition of SQL Server and OS across any physical, virtual or hybrid infrastructure.

Pricing and Availability
The DH2i CaaS solution is available now with “Starter Kit” pricing starting as low as $495 a month for five containers, a two-node active-active cluster and 24x7x365 managed services.