Kirkland, Washington-based Seek Systems Inc has become a member of Oracle Corp’s Oracle Business Alliance Program, agreeing to integrate its storage system technology to the Oracle database. The deal centers around on Seek’s Xcelerator cacheing controller technology, which is claimed to improve the performance of very large database applications by overcoming input-output bottle? necks, and its Adaptive Raid disk controller and subsystem. Xcelerator monitors data, storing active data in cache memory and inactive data on magnetic disk, reducing the need for temporary tables, transaction log files and enabling heavily accessed tables and indexes to be stored on a memory-based storage subsystem. The Cache in Xcelerator is divided into normal and protected spaces and uses protected space and the ‘least- frequently-used’ algorithm to avoid the cache pollution that occurs when one-hit read and write data replaces repeatedly-used data and commands. Xcelerator tracks how frequently data is accessed and moves the most heavily used data from nor?mal to protected space, keeping it safe until it detects that there is data that is more active. By monitoring data activity, it keeps most active data in cache, optimizing the use of expensive solid state memory or static RAM. Seek claims Xcelerator can configure up to 1Gb of cache and is suited to transaction processing markets where it lowers response time and batch processing. Prices go from $15,000. Adaptive Raid, released next month, dynamically manages the block size of disks, enabling disk administrators to avoid the need to reconfigure block size each time they need to add disk capacity. Privately-owned Seek Systems Inc says it is looking for distrib?utors in the UK, Europe and the Far East. It has 25 employees.
