Clustered computing brings with it many benefits: high performance, high availability, scalable infrastructure, etc.  But it also brings with it more complexity.

Why ?  Well, by its very nature, there are more "moving parts" to monitor and manage (from physical, virtual and logical hosts) to fault detection and failover software to redundant networking components - the list goes on.  And a cluster that isn't effectively provisioned and managed will cause more downtime than the standalone systems it is designed to improve upon.  Not so great....

When it comes to the database industry, analysts already estimate that 50% of a typical database's Total Cost of Ownership is attributable to staffing and downtime costs.  These costs will only increase if a database cluster is to hard to properly administer.

Over the past 9 months, monitoring and management has been a major focus in the development of the MySQL Cluster database, and on Tuesday 12th January, the product team will be presenting the output of that development in a new webinar.

Even if you can't make the date, it is still worth registering so you will receive automatic notification when the on-demand replay is available

In the webinar, the team will cover:

    * NDBINFO: released with MySQL Cluster 7.1, NDBINFO presents real-time status and usage statistics, providing developers and DBAs with a simple means of pro-actively monitoring and optimizing database performance and availability.
    * MySQL Cluster Manager (MCM): available as part of the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, MCM simplifies the creation and management of MySQL Cluster by automating common management tasks, delivering higher administration productivity and enhancing cluster agility. Tasks that used to take 46 commands can be reduced to just one!
    * MySQL Cluster Advisors & Graphs: part of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and available in the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, the Enterprise Advisor includes automated best practice rules that alert on key performance and availability metrics from MySQL Cluster data nodes.

You'll also learn how you can get started evaluating and using all of these tools to simplify MySQL Cluster management.

This session will last round an hour and will include interactive Q&A throughout.

You can learn more about MySQL Cluster Manager from this whitepaper and on-line demonstration.  You can also download the packages from eDelivery (just select "MySQL Database" as the product pack, select your platform, click "Go" and then scroll down to get the software).

While managing clusters will never be easy, the webinar will show hou how it just got a whole lot simpler !