SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

  • Home
  • Products
    • SIOS DataKeeper for Windows
    • SIOS Protection Suite for Linux
  • News and Events
  • Clustering Simplified
  • Success Stories
  • Contact Us
  • English
  • 中文 (中国)
  • 中文 (台灣)
  • 한국어
  • Bahasa Indonesia
  • ไทย

12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

September 10, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

Cloud migration best practices 

The “cloud is becoming more complicated,” it was the first statement in an hour-long webinar detailing the changes and opportunities with the boom in cloud computing and cloud migration.  The presenter continued with an outline of cloud related things that traditional IT is now facing in their journey to AWS, Azure, GCP or other providers.

There were nine areas that surfaced as complications in the traditional transition to cloud:

  • Definitions
  • Pricing
  • Networking
  • Security
  • Users, Roles, and Profiles
  • Applications and Licensing
  • Services and Support
  • Availability
  • Backups

As VP of Customer Experience for SIOS Technology Corp I’ve seen how the following areas can impact a transition to cloud. To mitigate these complications, consumers are turning to managed service providers, cloud solution architects, contractors and consultants, and a bevy of related services, guides, blog posts and related articles. Often in the process of turning to outside or outsourced resources the complications to cloud are not entirely removed.  Instead, companies and the teams they have employed to assist or to transition them to cloud still encounter roadblocks, speed bumps, hiccups and setbacks.

Most often these complications and slowdowns in migrating to the cloud come from twelve unanswered questions:

  1. What are our goals for moving to the cloud?
  2. What is your current on-premise architecture?  Do you have a document, list, flow chart, or cookbook?
  3. Are all of your application, database, availability and related vendors supported on your target cloud provider platform?
  4. What are your current on-premises risks and limitations?  What applications are unprotected, what are the most common issues faced on-premises?
  5. Who is responsible for the cloud architecture and design?  How will this architecture and design account for your current definitions and the definitions of the cloud provider?
  6. Who are the key stakeholders, and what are their milestones, business drivers, and deadlines for the business project?
  7. Have you shared your project plan and milestones with your vendors?
  8. What are the current processes, governance, and business requirements?
  9. What is the migration budget and does it include staff augmentation, training, and services? What are your estimates for ongoing maintenance, licensing, and operating expenses?
  10. What are your team’s existing skills and responsibilities?
  11. Who will be responsible for updating governance, processes, new cloud models, and the various traditional roles and responsibilities?
  12. What are the applications, services, or functions that will move from IaaS to SaaS models?

Know Your Goals for the Cloud

So, how will answering these twelve questions will improve your cloud migration. As you can see from the questions, understanding your goals for the cloud is the first, and most important step.  It is nearly universally accepted that “a cloud service provider such as AWS, Azure, or Google can provide the servers, storage, and communications resources that a particular application will require,” but for many customers, this only eliminates “he need for computer hardware and personnel to manage that hardware.” Because of this fact, often customers are focused on equipment or data center consolidation or reduction, without considering that there are additional cloud opportunities and gaps that they still need to consider. For example, cloud does eliminate management of hardware, but it “does not eliminate all the needs that an application and its dependencies will have for monitoring and recovery,” so if your goal was to get all your availability from the cloud, you may not reach that goal, or it may require more than just moving on premises to an IaaS model.   Knowing your goals will go a long way in helping you map out your cloud journey.

Know Your Current On-Premises Architecture

A second critical category of questions needed for a proper migration to the cloud, (or any new platform) is understanding the current on-premises architecture. This step not only helps with the identification of your critical applications that need availability, but also their underlying dependencies, and any changes required for those applications, databases, and backup solutions based on the storage, networking, and compute changes of the cloud.  Answering this question is also a key step in assessing the readiness of your applications and solutions for the cloud and quantifying your current risks.

A third area that will greatly benefit from working through these questions occurs when you discuss and quantify current limitations.  Frequently, we see this phase of discovery opening the door to limitations of current solutions that do not exist in the cloud.  For example, recently our services team worked with a customer impacted by performance issues in their SQL database cluster.  A SIOS expert assisting with their migration inquired about the solution and architecture, and VM sizing decisions. After a few moments, a larger more application sized instance was deployed correcting limitations that the customer had accepted due to their on-premise restrictions on compute, memory, and storage.  Similarly we have worked with customers who were storage sensitive.  They would run applications with smaller disks and a frequent resizing policy, due to disk capacity constraints. While storage costs should be considered, running with minimal margins can become a limitation of the past.

Understand Business and Governance Changes

The final group of questions help your team understand schedules, business impacts, deadlines, and governance changes that need to be updated or replaced because they may no longer apply in the cloud. Migrating to the cloud can be a smooth transition and journey.  However, failing to assess where you are on the journey and when you need to complete the journey can make it into a nightmare. Understanding timing is important and can be keenly aided by considering stakeholders, application vendors, business milestones, and business seasons.  Selfishly, SIOS Technology Corp. wants customers to understand their milestones because as a Service provider it minimizes the surprises. But, we also encourage customers to answer these questions as they often uncover misalignment between departments and stakeholders. The DBAs believes that the cutover will happen on the last weekend of the month, but Finance is intent on closing the books over the final weekend of the same month; or the IT team believes that cutover can happen on Monday, but the applications team is unavailable until Wednesday, and perhaps most importantly the legal team hasn’t combed through the list of new NDAs, agreements, licensing, and governance changes necessary to pull it all together.

As customers work through the questions, with safety and empathy, what often emerges is a puzzle of pieces, ownership, processes, and decision makers that needs to be put back together using the cloud provider box top and honest conversations on budget, staffing, training, and services.  The end result may not be a flawless migration, but it will definitely be a successful migration.

For help with your cloud migration strategy and high availability implementation, contact SIOS Technology Corp.

– Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Learn more about common cloud migration challenges.

Read about some misconceptions about availability in the cloud.

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Amazon AWS, Amazon EC2, Azure, Cloud, High Availability, migration

Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure

April 26, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

migration to cloud

Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure: To Build a “System That Never Stops” With Replication

“”We got several proposals for both on-premises and cloud, and decided to migrate to Microsoft Azure with Fujitsu’s proposal of SIOS DataKeeper – that best fits our requirements,” said Akihiko Kobayashi, a System Representative.

Toyo Gosei is a long-established chemical manufacturer that has been operating business for 65 years. The company’s main product, photosensitive materials for photoresist, is an indispensable material for manufacturing liquid crystal displays and semiconductor integrated circuits. The company is also focusing on technological development for the most advanced photosensitive materials.

In 2007, the company was required to select the successor system of GLOVIA/Process C1, which had been used as a core business system. While receiving proposals from several companies, they chose to introduce “SAP,” an ERP system of German company SAP because of its solid J-SOX support. Time passed and around 2015, the servers installed when introducing SAP had come to the end of maintenance.

IT Infrastructure

The company’s IT infrastructure is an on-premises VMware-based data center and a remote data center for business continuity/disaster protection. Since most of their applications run on the Microsoft Windows operating system, they used guest-level Windows Server failover clustering in their VMware environment to provide high availability and disaster protection.

The Challenge – Migrating to Azure

Behind the migration to cloud, there were needs to be free from on-premises system maintenance, demands for flexibility of scale-up and preparing for disaster based on the experience during the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Their decision to go to cloud was driven by the fact that the servers in their premises physically moved during the earthquake and it almost led to a failure.

When migrating to Azure, the company built a backup system to address system failures and in case of disasters. “SAP has all the data necessary for our business. If SAP stops, the production process also stops. If the outage continues for two or three days, shipment, payment and billing is also stopped. The SAP system cannot be stopped,” said Kobayashi.

The first step was to set up a SAP backup system on Azure to take a daily backup of the production system in the East Japan region of Azure and a weekly backup of the standby system in the West Japan region.

Implementation

“However, backup is just a backup. Basically we need to make production system redundant in order to prevent it from stopping. On AWS, which was used for information systems, shared disks were available with a redundant configuration. However, Azure does not support shared disks. For this reason, we decided to use DataKeeper of SIOS Technology that enables data replication on Azure,” said Kobayashi.

They created a cluster configuration between storage systems connected to the redundant SAP production system and replicate the data using DataKeeper to make it consistent. This provides the same availability as when using shared disks even on Azure where shared disk configuration is not supported.

“We have been in stable operations after the initial stage where a failover occurred,” said Kobayashi. “Regarding SIOS DataKeeper, the only thing we have to do is renew the maintenance contract.”

The Results

As a mid-term plan in the future, they need to prepare for the “SAP 2025 problem” where support for the current SAP version will expire. They have not built a specific plan, but Kobayashi said, “when moving to the new architecture S/4HANA and if clustering is required, we will implement SIOS DataKeeper because we trust it.“

SIOS DataKeeper is a reliable partner for Kobayashi. “Because you cannot stop the production system, it is IT personnel’s responsibility to choose a reliable tool,” he said.

Get a Free Trial of SIOS DataKeeper

Learn more about SAP high availability on Azure

Download the PDF version of the Case Study

Filed Under: Success Stories Tagged With: Azure, migration

Microsoft End-To-End Cross-Site Disaster Recovery Solution

January 23, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Cross-Site Disaster Recovery Solution

Microsoft has recently updated their Virtualization Continuity page with some good information.

Implementing a reliable, rapid-recovery strategy can be time-consuming to implement and expensive to manage. Due to the complexity and cost, many companies simply don’t have comprehensive business continuity plans to protect their data and ensure application availability.

Virtualization has been a game changer for many companies. With virtualization based Site Recovery solutions, you can ensure higher availability and business continuity options. Windows Server provides support for a wide range of industry leading, shared storage solutions to deliver Quick and Live Migration. Combined with partner cross-site data management and replication technologies, Microsoft is offering complete Cross-Site Disaster Recovery Solution

In summary, Microsoft Site Recovery solutions provide these key benefits:

  • Bullet proof application and data availability across a range of applications
  • Site-wide disaster recovery that can help you gain immediate and long-term operational and capital benefits
  • Automated fail-over and fail back based on clustering and data resynchronization delivering superior application and data availability, for planned and unplanned downtime

Also, they have recently published a white paper entitled “Microsoft End-to-End Cross-Site Disaster Recovery Solutions“. This is a must read for anyone deploying SteelEye DataKeeper in a Cross-Site Disaster Recovery configuration.

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2009/12/22/microsoft-end-to-end-cross-site-disaster-recovery-solution/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: cross site disaster recovery solution, Cross-Site Disaster Recovery Solutions, disaster recovery, Live Migration, Microsoft, Microsoft Site Recovery, migration, Quick Migration, recovery, Virtualisation Continuity

The Difference Between Hyper-V Live Migration And Quick Migration

January 22, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

With the launch of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the interest in DataKeeper replication solutions for Hyper-V, I have been pretty busy – which is a good thing! Recently, I have been speaking with some Microsoft Gold Partners who are busy installing Hyper-V at their customer locations and looking at some of the disaster recovery options, including multi-site Hyper-V clusters with SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition. Many of the questions are the same each time and the demonstration is always the same. I figured it may be beneficial to produce a video that talks specifically about one of the questions – the difference between Live Migration and Quick Migration and when to use one vs. the other. This video that demonstrates Live Migration and Quick Migration while discussing some of the things to consider may be of interest to you.

 Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2009/11/17/the-difference-between-hyper-v-live-migration-and-quick-migration/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified, Datakeeper Tagged With: DataKeeper, Hyper V, Live Migration, migration, Quick Migration, Windows Server

Hyper-V Live Migration Across Data Centers

January 22, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

There has recently been a lot of press, about executing virtual machines live migrations across long-distanced data centers, that herald VMware’s limited support for vMotion across Data Centers, or “long-distance vMotion” as I have seen it called. The details of the solution can be found on Cisco’s website here. While I think that is just great, I’d like to remind people that Microsoft Hyper-V has this same functionality today and has a lot less requirements and restrictions than VMware’s long-distance vMotion.

Where VMware has VMwareHA, vMotion and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to take care of virtual machine availability, Microsoft provides the same functionality with Windows Server Failover Clustering and in fact in some cases goes beyond what VMware can provide in terms of virtual machine availability as I described in a previous post.

What I’d like to focus on today is Microsoft’s competitive offering to “long-distance vMotion”. To achieve the same functionality in Hyper-V, you simply deploy a multi-site Hyper-V cluster using Windows Server Failover Clustering and your favorite host or storage based replication solution that is certified to work in a Windows Server 2008 multi-site cluster. By doing this, you can use your existing network infrastructure and your existing storage infrastructure to do Live Migrations across data centers. As far as requirements, they really are the same as any multi-site cluster, except I would recommend that you span your subnets to avoid client reconnection issues that occur when moving a virtual machine to a new subnet, as the clients could cache to old IP address until the TTL expires.

A demonstration video of Live Migration across data centers using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition can be seen here.

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2009/09/17/hyper-v-live-migration-across-data-centers/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified, Datakeeper Tagged With: DataKeeper Cluster Edition, Hyper V, Live Migration, Microsoft, migration, VMware

Recent Posts

  • Announcing LifeKeeper/SSP/DKCE for Windows 8.11.0: Enhanced Stability, Security, and Support
  • Why an Effective Patch Management Strategy Is Essential for IT Resilience
  • Streamlining External Communication for Emergency Procedures
  • Avoiding the Disaster You Don’t See Coming: Building a Resilient DR Plan
  • The Best Rolling Upgrade Strategy to Enhance Business Continuity

Most Popular Posts

Maximise replication performance for Linux Clustering with Fusion-io
Failover Clustering with VMware High Availability
create A 2-Node MySQL Cluster Without Shared Storage
create A 2-Node MySQL Cluster Without Shared Storage
SAP for High Availability Solutions For Linux
Bandwidth To Support Real-Time Replication
The Availability Equation – High Availability Solutions.jpg
Choosing Platforms To Replicate Data - Host-Based Or Storage-Based?
Guide To Connect To An iSCSI Target Using Open-iSCSI Initiator Software
Best Practices to Eliminate SPoF In Cluster Architecture
Step-By-Step How To Configure A Linux Failover Cluster In Microsoft Azure IaaS Without Shared Storage azure sanless
Take Action Before SQL Server 20082008 R2 Support Expires
How To Cluster MaxDB On Windows In The Cloud

Join Our Mailing List

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in