ClusterScale has officially launched in the UK with the introduction of two new products; ClusterLoad ESX, a load balancing virtual appliance for VMware environments; and ClusterMirror, a database appliance providing a cost-effective way to ensure high availability of applications.

The company has been born out of loadbalancer.org, but is looking to compete with high-end rivals such as F5 networks. As part of this move, the firm has developed a new 64bit version of its platform and is selling this to customers via the reseller channel on Dell server hardware.

"Lots of load balancers are on Supermicro kit, but we decided to go with Dell because it is decent hardware and they can offer on-site support in 180 countries," said founder and chief executive Malcolm Turnbull.

However, of the two new products, one is a virtual machine designed to be deployed atop VMware's ESX platform. ClusterLoad ESX VA manages application traffic and routes requests to servers just the same as ClusterScale's load-balancing hardware, but lowers demands on the datacentre by running as a clustered pair in the virtual environment.

Prices start at £3,995 for a single virtual appliance, or £5,595 for a pair.

Meanwhile, ClusterMirror is designed to provide companies with high availability for enterprise applications such as a database, but at a competitive price. It employs a mirroring technique to keep an exact duplicate of the entire server.

"We've taken two servers and put a network mirror between them so they stay in complete sync. If the first server goes down, you have a complete byte-for-byte copy ready to take over," said Turnbull.

In such a situation, user sessions may be interrupted momentarily, but no data will be lost, and the application carries on being available, he added.

"The traditional way to do this is with an Oracle cluster or a SAN but we come in at a mid-range price," Turnbull said. Pricing starts at £17,995.

ClusterScale also has plans for a version of ClusterMirror with three nodes, according to Turnbull. This is aimed at customers such as banks, which have a requirement for a backup unit in case of one failing. This version is expected before the end of 2008.

Turnbull said that ClusterScale had been 'kind of an invisible company' since it started operations earlier this year. Its formation was to take the loadbalancer.org products into the channel so the company can more effectively compete with rivals such as F5 Networks.