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Solid Announces New Release Of Flagship Autonomic Platform

Solid Information Technology Corp, provider of an Autonomic Data Management Platform, announced the general availability of the next version of its platform, release 4.2.

Solid is frequently used in a hot standby configuration to support carrier-grade highly available applications. In Version 4.2, Solid adds a "1- Safe" hot standby option to its existing 2-Safe configurations. This option provides higher application throughput for systems with lower data reliability requirements, offering an improvement in speed of over 10 times compared with the highest reliability option. This adds to the already flexible safeness and durability options that allow Solid customers unprecedented flexibility in tuning their applications for data reliability and application throughput.

The new release strengthens the self-managing aspects of the platform by making it easier to detect and modify server behavior at run time, allowing operations like a switch between running in hot standby and standalone modes, or switching to a new secondary machine for hot standby operations. In addition, new features in Version 4.2 make it easier to dynamically upgrade a Solid data manager that is used in a high availability application without disrupting continuous operations.

Solid enhanced its asynchronous data replication facility, Solid SmartFlow, to allow the traffic between masters and replicas to be compressed. Client/server traffic may also be compressed in Version 4.2, further reducing Solid's consumption of bandwidth, reducing transaction times and enhancing application throughput.

As part of its commitment to continuously increasing performance, Solid announced that it had doubled the speed of look-ups to in-memory tables. Version 4.2 also includes many minor performance improvements. As well, Solid announced support for a new platform: Linux on PowerPC hardware.

"In every Solid release you will see us expanding the autonomic envelope," said Ari Valtanen, CTO and co-founder of Solid. "In Version 4.2 we focused on the self-configuring and self-optimizing axes. We have a clear roadmap of how we and our customers want the product to evolve, and the on-time delivery of Version 4.2 is an important step in that journey."

Said Jussi Harvela, Solid president and CEO, "Solid engineering continues to deliver the innovation that our customers seek. Version 4.2 makes it even simpler to manage Solid installations, and the performance gains in 4.2 keep Solid at the forefront in providing data management for some of the world's most challenging applications."