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New SIOS Documentation Site

February 20, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

New SIOS Documentation Site

New SIOS Documentation Site

Features New Easy-to-Use Site Layout and Improved Navigation

The SIOS Product Management, Product Marketing, and Technical Documentation teams are excited to announce our new documentation site on a new, easier-to-use platform. Check out the new site here: docs.us.sios.com.

The new layout of our documentation site has improved the following functionalities:

  • Quick and easy navigation with HTML anchor buttons
  • Topic descriptions with HTML title tags for easier searching
  • Navigational tips and instruction for enhanced navigation within our documentation

We’d love to hear your feedback!

Within our documentation, please provide feedback by posting a comment on specific topics to help us keep our content as up-to-date and relevant as possible.

Please see our improved  “Solutions” sections for answers to common questions or concerns by searching “Solutions” within our documentation pages.

sios documentation overview

Overall Navigation: When it comes to the new navigation, most of the items on the new page are “anchored”; so by selecting a button you will be taken to the selected section.  We can first start off by selecting our operating system.

choose OS

This will bring us to products offered within the operating system Windows/Linux.

After selecting our operating system, we will now select our product. Below each product (Datakeeper/LifeKeeper/Evaluation Guides/Step-by-Step Guides) are short descriptions of each solution within each product. To see the description of each product, hover over the Product Information dropdown.

select product
select windows

Once a product is selected, we will now see the most commonly used topics for the solutions within a product.

datakeeper cluster for windows options

By hovering over a topic for a few moments, you will see a brief description of what each topic is about.

After a topic is selected, you will land on the most recent version number of the topic selected. If the most recent version is NOT the version you are running, please utilize the dropdown menu in the top to reach the version you are looking for. SIOS recommends upgrading to the latest version for the newest features, bug fixes, and overall improvements in our product.

dkce options

Navigational Tips: Let’s scroll back up to the top of our new documentation page layout. Below selecting your operating system we have a link to navigation tips to keep in mind when using the new documentation site for better ease of use. Here you will see a list of general terms of what each topic is about as well as information on how to view the general terms by hovering over a topic for a few moments.

Below General Terms we have Navigations Tips:

  1. Navigating to a specific “version number” within our documentation.
  2. Finding Older Versions – If you were not able to locate your version in the dropdown list within our documentation, click the Older Versions topic on our new page in order to see all versions both supported and unsupported.
  3. For Upgrade instructions, please see the first topic in our list. SIOS recommends upgrading to our latest software so that you will have the most up to date fixes and features of our product.

You can always get back to our main documentation page from the navigational tips page by selecting the home or back button.

main support nav

Below the Operating System text, you can follow the link to the versions via “Product Support Schedule”.

(Note: After a product is released, it is supported for at least 3 years.)

For support assistance, please follow “support.us.sios.com” for information in contacting support. This will lead up to the new documentation page.

For our customers in Japan, please click the link here in order to view our new page in Japanese.

select windows or linux
japanese windows linux selection

I hope this helped in learning how to better navigate our new documentation site. Thank you for choosing SIOS!

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: News and Events Tagged With: Documentation, SIOS

Introduction To Clusters – Part 1

November 18, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Introduction To Clusters – Part 1

Introduction To Clusters – Part 1

What is clustering in the first place?

Clustering technology is a technology that allows you to connect multiple servers to act as a single functional unit.

Types of clustering

You can cluster servers for several purposes. For example, you can combine the processing power of multiple small servers for high performance. You can also distribute processing work to multiple nodes using a load balancer for added efficiency.

High availability (HA) clustering is a process of combining server nodes to protect important applications from downtime and data loss.

Introduction To Clusters
In a traditional shared storage failover cluster, a primary node and secondary or remote node share the same storage.

HA Clustering

High availability (HA) clustering is a mechanism that reduces downtime by eliminating single points of failure (SPOF). In an HA cluster, important applications are run on a primary node which is connected to one or more secondary or remote nodes in a cluster. Clustering software monitors the health of the application, server, and network. In the event of a failure on the primary node, it moves application operations over to a secondary node in a process called a failover, where operation continues.

High Availability

Application high availability is a measure of how much time in a given year an application is available and operational. In general, HA clusters provide 99.99% (Four nines) availability or a little more than 52 minutes of downtime over the course of a given year.

It is important to note that in a traditional HA cluster, all of the cluster nodes are connected to the same shared storage – typically a SAN. In this way, after a failover, the secondary node is accessing the same data as the primary node and operation can continue.

Introduction To Clusters
SANless cluster synchronizes local storage using host-based block level replication.

SANless Clusters

However, many companies prefer to use a SANless cluster for several reasons. First, shared storage represents a critical single point of failure. Second, shared storage is often not an option in public cloud environments. Third, SANs can sometimes impede performance of database applications, such as SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP.

Instead of shared storage, these companies use efficient, host-based, block-level replication to synchronize local storage on all cluster nodes. In the event of a failover, the secondary node is connected to local storage with an identical copy of the primary storage. This not only eliminates the SAN SPOF risk but also enables the addition of fast disk (SSD) to local on-premises storage for cost-efficient high performance. SANless clustering also enables companies to migrate on-premises HA environments to the cloud with minimal effort or disruption of ongoing business processes.

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: cluster, Clustering, SIOS

Disaster Recovery

November 2, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery

How to Enable Disaster Recovery with a Single Clustering Software Solution

Protect Windows or Linux Applications Operating in any Combination of Physical, Virtual, Cloud, or Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures with Disaster Recovery

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery is Critical to Continued Business Operations

Disaster recovery (DR) is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools that ensure critical IT systems, databases, and applications continue to operate and be available to users when a man-made or natural disaster happens. While the IT team owns the disaster recovery strategy, DR is an important component of every organization’s Business Continuity Plan, which is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools that get the entire business back up and running after a disaster.

But when we speak of a disaster, it does not need to be a full-fledged hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake that impacts your business. Disasters come in many forms, including a cyber-attack, user error, fire, theft, vandalism, even a terrorist attack. In short, a disaster is any crisis that results in a down system for a long duration and/or major data loss on a large scale that impacts your IT infrastructure, data center, and your business.

Disaster Recovery

In a recent Spiceworks survey, 59 percent of organizations indicated they had experienced one to three outages (that is, any interruption to normal levels of IT-related service) over the course of one year, 11 percent have experienced four to six, and 7 percent have experienced seven or more. In addition, the survey also indicates that larger companies, which rely on a greater number of services, are more likely to experience outages than smaller organizations. For example, 71 percent of small businesses experienced one or more outages in the last 12 months, compared to 79 percent of mid-size businesses, and 87 percent of large businesses. When you look at those statistics, you know you are living on borrowed time if you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place.

But there is good news. Compared with statistics from previous years, it appears that organizations of all sizes and from all industries are doing better when it comes to having a disaster recovery plan in place. According to the same Spiceworks survey, 95 percent of organizations have a DR plan in place but unfortunately, 23 percent never test or exercise their plan. Exercising your DR plan is as important as a student fire drill or muster drill. Having a plan in place is just the first step. If the people involved in executing the plan don’t know what to do, you won’t be able to recover from a disaster.

High Availability Vs. Disaster Recovery

But before we go any further, let’s be clear on the difference between best practices for handling a system failure versus a disaster. To recover from a system failure, redundant systems, software, and data should be on your local area network (LAN). For critical database applications, you can replicate data synchronously across the LAN. This makes your standby instance “hot” and in sync with your active instance, so it is ready to take over immediately in the event of a failure. This is referred to as high availability (HA).

However, to recover systems, software, and data in the event of a disaster means redundant components must be on a wide-area network (WAN). With a WAN, data replication is asynchronous to avoid negatively impacting throughput performance. This means that updates to standby instances will lag updates made to the active instance, resulting in a delay during the recovery process. Since disasters are rare, some delay may be tolerable and is dependent upon (a) how critical it is to your business to achieve the lowest possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and (b) how much budget you can allocate to achieve the best RTO and RPO.

RTO is the maximum tolerable duration of any outage and RPO is the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated when a disaster happens. For disaster recovery, RTOs of many minutes or even hours is common with some solutions as it is too expensive to try to recover across a WAN in just a few minutes. For mission-critical applications, your organization will want to achieve a low RPO but the lower your RPO, the more you need processes in place to ensure all data has been replicated on the standby server before failover. This effort tends to increase recovery time.

But with SIOS disaster recovery solution, you can achieve a minimal-to-no-data-loss RPO and an RTO of one to two minutes.

SIOS Delivers One Solution to Meet Your HA and DR Needs

Whether you need local HA within a single site or fast, efficient DR across multiple sites, SIOS solutions meet all your business continuity needs.

The SIOS disaster recovery solution is a multi-site, geographically dispersed cluster that provides RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes. What makes SIOS different than many other DR providers is that it offers one solution that meets both high availability and disaster recovery needs.

To support DR, you configure your clusters the same way as you do for high availability but with two distinct differences previously discussed:

  • The DR cluster node(s) are in a geographic site – on-premises, virtual, or in the cloud – that is further away from the HA instance.
  • The DR site is on a wide-area network (WAN), which means that data replication will be asynchronous to avoid negatively impacting throughput performance.

Remember, asynchronous data replication means that updates to the DR instances will lag updates made to the active instance but typically only by a few seconds at most. But with SIOS’ incredibly fast data replication across the WAN, you can keep real-time copies of data synchronized across multiple servers and data centers to achieve both HA and DR.

In addition to one single solution for HA/DR and real-time data replication, the SIOS HA/DR solution also provides:

  • Block-level data compression to minimize network loads
  • Bandwidth throttling to regulate and minimize network congestion
  • WAN optimization to improve network performance
  • Integration with push-button failover to support DR and automatic failover to support HA
  • An agnostic platform approach, allowing you to choose on-premises, virtual, cloud, or a hybrid DR solution

The following case study showcases the use of SIOS DataKeeper to deliver HA and DR in a single solution.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Enabling HA and DR Protection at a Premier Health Center

ALYN Hospital, located in Israel, is a premier pediatric rehabilitation health center, specializing in diagnosing and rehabilitating infants, children, and adolescents with physical disabilities. Parents bring their children from Israel and abroad to receive a wide range of medical services, paramedical therapies, and additional state-of-the-art rehabilitation services.

The Search for the Right Solution

ALYN Hospital operates a variety of applications – including electronic medical records (EMR), customer relationship management (CRM), SQL Server databases, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Office in support of its clinical and administrative operations. As a healthcare provider, the hospital is subject to strict government regulations and needed to implement strong DR provisions to ensure the protection and availability of their mission-critical applications. The hospital chose Hyper-V Replica to support its DR strategy, operating two, physically separated server rooms on-premises, enabling all critical virtual machines (VNs) running on any Hyper-V host server to be replicated to another in the other room. Unfortunately, this configuration was not satisfying RPO and RTO requirements, so the IT team started to investigate other options.

In looking for the right DR solution, the IT team considered Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), which uses shared storage. Unfortunately, ALYN did not have a SAN in place and because of budget restrictions, it was cost-prohibitive to implement identical SANs in both server rooms. For this reason, ALYN investigated third-party solutions.

In its search for third-party failover clustering software, ALYN established three criteria:

  • The solution had to work with existing hardware.
  • The solution had to provide both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protection across all hospital critical applications.
  • The total cost of ownership (TCO) had to fit within the department’s limited budget.

SIOS DataKeeper – The Obvious Choice

After evaluating several different solutions, the IT staff chose SIOS DataKeeper, which the team described as a solution “that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership” and delivers HA and DR in a single cost-effective solution.

SIOS DataKeeper combines real-time, block-level data replication with continuous application-level monitoring and flexible failover/failback policies in a total solution that is easy to implement and manage. DataKeeper leverages WSFC and maintains compatibility with the operating environment, making it easy for the IT team to quickly learn how to use the solution and quickly complete HA configurations for all applications.

With DataKeeper, the IT team can create three-node SANless failover clusters with a single active instance and two standby instances. With this configuration, ALYN can continuously update systems and software without disrupting operations because the active instance can be moved to any server in a three-node cluster and remain fully protected during periods of planned hardware and software maintenance.

In addition, SIOS can work with any type of storage and WAN-optimized data replication, which simplifies the implementation of ALYN’s remote DR site. To maintain high transactional throughput performance, data replication across the WAN occurs asynchronously but SIOS DataKeeper employs special techniques to optimize data transmission, allowing ALYN to achieve demanding RPOs and RTOs.

The Bottom Line

Today, SIOS DataKeeper is providing high availability protection for all of ALYN Hospital’s mission-critical applications. Comments Uri Inbar, ALYN Hospital IT Director, “With SIOS we found a solution that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership. For us, it was an obvious choice.

ALYN Hospital tests the configuration regularly, and routinely changes the active and standby designations, while redirecting the data replication as needed during planned software updates. The applications continue to run uninterrupted.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

 Final Thoughts on SIOS Disaster Recovery

In a Windows environment, SIOS DataKeeper for Windows Server is available in both a Standard Edition and a more robust Cluster Edition. SIOS DataKeeper Standard Edition provides real-time data replication for disaster recovery protection in a Windows Server environment. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition seamlessly integrates with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), enabling both high availability and disaster recovery configurations.

SIOS LifeKeeper and DataKeeper support all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Oracle Linux and accommodates a wide range of storage architectures.

Visit the references below for more information on SIOS DataKeeper or SIOS LifeKeeper:

References

  • https://betanews.com/2019/05/28/disaster-recovery-sql-server/
  • https://community.spiceworks.com/blog/3138-data-snapshot-how-well-equipped-are-businesses-to-bounce-back-from-disaster
  • https://www.spiceworks.com/press/releases/spiceworks-study-reveals-one-in-four-companies-never-test-their-disaster-recovery-plan/

See our White Paper:  Understanding Disaster Recovery for Options for SQL Server

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: disaster recovery, SIOS

SIOS Announces New Version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suite for Windows

October 5, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS Announces New Version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suite for Windows

SIOS Announces New Version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suits for Windows

Enhanced HA Clustering for Business Critical Applications on AWS

SIOS is pleased to announce version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suite for Windows – with innovations designed to make HA clustering in the cloud faster and easier.

SIOS Protection Suite for Windows includes SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition for efficient host-based, block level replication, SIOS LifeKeeper for application monitoring and failover orchestration, and a variety of application recovery kits for advanced, application-specific intelligence. SIOS DataKeeper can also be used independently  to add efficient replication to  Windows Server Failover Clustering environments for SANless clustering in the cloud.

Improved High Availability for Business Critical Applications on AWS

In version 8.8, SIOS has added several enhancements to SIOS Protection Suite to make creating and managing clusters in public clouds easy and error free. New features include:

  • Application Recovery Kit (ARK) support of AWS Route 53 DNS Service and EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud services
    • Integration with these AWS services provides faster and more efficient recovery and access to protected applications after a switchover to a backup server in another AWS Region or Availability Zone.
    • SIOS ARKs automate the interaction with cloud services, reducing manual tasks and ensuring configuration accuracy
  • Streamlined failover of servers in Azure Cloud using the Internal Load Balancer (ILB)

These new features give enterprises additional confidence that the high availability they have always trusted from SIOS can be achieved in the public cloud, keeping applications and data safe and reducing downtime.

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: SIOS

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

April 22, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

What SIOS can do for you?

With SIOS, get ready to enjoy high availability cluster protection for 70% less than SQL Enterprise Edition, Oracle Enterprise Edition/ RAC. On top of that, save running costs from not having to migrate to a certain vendors’ cloud platform for extended support.

Rest assured. SIOS is SAP certified for all major Linux and cloud providers, hence you can easily achieve High Availability and Disaster Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). Thereby, allowing snapshot-based backups to succeed.

Best of all, overcome technical limitations of native features from application and database software vendors.

No Configuration Limitations

SIOS is a high availability solution that is suitable for use in any Windows/Linus Application on Physical, Virtual, Public/Virtual Cloud.

Why Sell SIOS HA Solutions

SIOS has been a high availability solutions leader for 20 years, with its strength as a simple add-on to fit any HA environment. Specifically focusing on channel sales, the great margins translate to cost reduction for customers by more than 60% . You will be provided with sales support and given marketing opportunities. Most of all, you can be guaranteed access to a world-class technical support team.

SIOS strives to solve customers’ challenges by providing usable solutions. 

  • Benefits for MSSQL customers

Use SIOS Datakeeper with AlwaysOn FCI on SQL standard edition with no need for Enterprise Edition, thereby saving more than 66% of cost. Maintain support even after migrating customers’ old MSSQL 2008 to cloud. SIOS supports multinode cluster (MS limitation), and provides protection for Master System Databases (Master, MSD). Also, it protects other files and applications other than MSSQL

  • Benefits for Oracle customers

SIOS offers protection for Oracle DB and  75% cost savings with Oracle standard edition. Use SIOS with STD edition and continue to get High Availability even as Oracle ends RAC support for STD edition from v.19c onward. SIOS is less complex than Dataguard and RAC, thereby reducing administrative time and costs. Enjoy the ease and flexibility to  run Oracle DB with High Availability on any cloud provider platform. Protect other files and applications not just Oracle DB.

  • Benefits for SAP customers 

With its easy implementation, application protection wizards, and management via GUI, be sure to save time and cost on your projects. No change from on-premises clustering design and versions used as you migrate to cloud by “life-and-shift”.

As a high availability solution, SIOS promises to offer protection that SAP does not cover. Automatic failure detection and failover orchestration for HANA and Central Services with automatic ERS switchover to opposite node (feature not provided by opensource/HAE). Certified by SAP for any cloud provider and and linux flavor. This includes Oracle Linux with SAP in public cloud providers All SAP customers enjoy commercial-grade replication and tech support.

  • Benefits for VMware environments

Achieve High Availability, Data Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). This allows for snapshot backups that is not supported with VMware HA. Additionally, you get to enjoy cost savings since there is no need for single-point-of-failure SAN or SAN-to-SAN replication for High Availability, Data Recovery. Similarly, this ends the need for complex vSphere replication for DR of applications like SQL, SAP, Oracle etc. With SIOS, you’ll easily achieve full application monitoring and automated failover.  Furthermore, this feature is not provided by VMware HA, only VM and host failures. 

The solution is specifically designed for HA with full stack monitoring (server, VM, application, network, split-brain). Like a hybrid our high availability solution works on-premises with any VM-to-any Cloud.

Download PDF

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: high availability solutions, MSSQL, Oracle, SAP, SIOS

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