Red Rock goes solo for SQL management

When Red Rock Consulting took a look at the Microsoft SQL server market almost a decade ago, something became very apparent: tools and technology were needed in a managed service environment. If tools weren’t developed, the personnel costs needed to manage Microsoft SQL Server could become prohibitive.

Red Rock, a subsidiary of systems integrator UXC set out to do something about it. It started a product development division, and created RockSolid, a Microsoft SQL server management tool.

“RockSolid allows us to support large deployment bases,” Tony Bain, director for RockSolid SQL told CRN. “SQL Server is different to Oracle. For starters, there’s a lot more deployment in small organisations. We have clients with over 100 production servers, and those clients are in the SMB space.”

The company has just ticked over 10,000 databases under management. “We have 100 customers, and of those, 15 are what we would consider to be enterprise customers with very large deployments.”

In essence, said Bain, RockSolid is a tool which does mass scale monitoring, and large scale data collection. It also does real time analysis and combines that with machine learning to detect issues with the SQL Servers under management.

“We are able to predict issues in real time and perform automated resolution on all but the most complicated, or uncommon problems,” he said.

One of the reasons the product can do automated prediction and resolution is because a lot of database processes are flow chartable and subject to best practice.

“That is the difference between us, and System Centre or Foglight,” Bain said “We follow database processes as a resolution path.”

Bain said it’s only the most complicated problems that are escalated to human-level intervention. Even on those cases, however, RockSolid provides background data and process information to allow swift resolution. “If we didn’t have this tool we couldn’t service the market we do,” he said. “It’s what gives us scale.”

RockSolid has been licensed to a handful of the company’s largest customers. “We won’t sell it as standalone for companies with less than 100 servers,” he said.

Key verticals, he added, include financial services, mining, manufacturing and retail.

The next step for RockSolid is, somewhat predictably, the cloud and the tool has just been accepted by Amazon in its marketplace. “We see the cloud as a big opportunity – one of the key differentiators is the ability to scale, thousands to tens of thousands of systems in a single implementation,” Bain said. “However, the cloud does not change the management overhead.

“What it can change is who is responsible for management,” he added. “Through the cloud we can provide management to enterprise users, end users, and hosting providers offering it as a service.”