Data management software maker Sanbolic announced today that AppCluster will be made available to Rackspace Cloud customers.

AppCluster automates the administration of databases in Microsoft SQL enterprise environments – it’s specifically designed to be deployed in IaaS environments, and it aims to make the DBA’s job that much easier. It simplifies fail-over, load-balancing and migration in both virtualized and physical SQL clusters in conjunction with a couple of other Sanbolic solutions: the Melio FS file system and the LaScala volume manager.

Now that AppCluster works with Rackspace’s public cloud, the two companies are touting a number of customer advantages.  The platform can help achieve a reduction in the cost and complexity of managing SQL Server clusters, they say, while also “dramatically increase management control” over clusters that have either been migrated to the Rackspace Cloud or have been newly created.

“We are excited to collaborate with Sanbolic to allow them to make the AppCluster solution available to customers,” Christopher Rajiah, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Rackspace said in a statement. “This effort will enable existing and future SQL Server users to confidently move this area of their IT infrastructure into the cloud to dramatically lower the associated costs and management burden, while enjoining high availability and on-demand scalability.”

Rackspace is focused on expanding right now. It recently acquired a relatively unknown startup that developed an OpenStack integration service that evidently caught management’s eye, and bringing a new partner aboard is yet another step in the right direction.

It’s notable that Microsoft is also eyeing more market share in the cloud, and it’s banking on third party database solutions such as AppCluster to help realize this goal. The software giant partnered up with a number of new vendors a couple months ago, but Sanbolic has been an ally for much longer than that.  Earlier this year the latter firm debuted ShareCenter, a NAS solution for Windows Server.