SIOS SANless clusters | SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

May 24, 2020	Solution Brief: SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments Solution Brief: SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments SIOS SANless clusters are an easy, cost-efficient way to add disaster protection to your physical server-based cluster environment without the cost and complexity of an additional data center or disaster recovery site. Add a SIOS SANless cluster node in a cloud to your physical server-based cluster environment for efficient, real time, block level replication and disaster protection for your business critical applications. SIOS software enables failover of application instances across geographic locations and cloud availability zones or regions to provide site-wide, local, and regional disaster protection. SIOS SANless software lets you build a cluster using the local storage available to your physical, virtual, or cloud systems. SIOS software keeps local storage synchronized for high availability protection without the need for shared storage. Configuration flexibility Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within your organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, SIOS SANless software gives you the flexibility to build a fully automated, application-centric cluster and replication solution with your choice of industry standard hardware, replication schema, and deployment (active/active, active/passive). SIOS SANless clusters span environments letting you protect data with high availability and disaster recovery without the cost and complexity of a remote disaster recovery site. SIOS software lets you replicate between the configurations of your choice – between SAN and SANless environments and any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud configurations. No vendor lock in. No need for identical hardware at the source and destination. Easy to use. Easy to own You can build a SIOS SANless cluster and configure it in minutes using our intuitive interface. SIOS also makes monitoring and management of your clusters easy. The user-friendly management console lets you monitor the status of protected servers, communication paths, resources and applications at glance. Key Benefits Disaster Protection • Easy, cost efficient high availability and disaster protection for business critical applications Flexibility • Mix physical server and cloud environments for maximum efficiency. Ease of Use • Intuitive console for easy ongoing monitoring and management. Download Solution Brief on SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments
May 19, 2020	Solution Brief: SANless Cluster Solutions for Virtual Server Environments Solution Brief: SANless Cluster Solutions for Virtual Server Environments SIOS SANless software lets you build a cluster in a virtualized environment without the need for shared storage. You can use any local storage types available and provided by the hypervisor. SIOS software uses efficient block-level replication to keep local storage synchronized, enabling the standby servers in your cluster to continue to operate after a failover with access to the most recent data. Cluster virtual machines SIOS SANless software lets you create a cluster using virtual machines sitting on top of any hypervisor (VMware, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and others). It uses real-time replication to synchronize storage on the primary VM with storage on a standby VM located in the same data center, in your disaster recovery site, or both. In the event of a disaster, the standby VM can be brought into service immediately, eliminating the hours needed for restoration from back-up media. You simply access the replicated VMs in the DR site directly. Hyper-V host clustering that supports Live Migrations In Microsoft Hyper-V environments, SIOS SANless software allows you to cluster entire Hyper-V host machines at the hypervisor level for complete VM portability and failover protection. By keeping a real-time copy of the running VM synchronized on an alternate Hyper-V host, SIOS software allows you to easily failover or Live Migrate a VM from one Hyper-V host to another. You get complete portability to move individual VMs or all of the VMs on a host to another Hyper-V host in the cluster. Build a SIOS SANless cluster using virtual servers (A). In Microsoft Hyper-V environments (B), SIOS SANless clusters can be used at the virtual machine level for easy Live Migrations and complete server portability. Easy disaster recovery testing SIOS software also lets you restore replicated VMs to perform disaster recovery testing without disruption to the production site. When testing is complete, SIOS software eliminates changes that were made on the target server during the testing and resumes the replication from where it stopped. Download Solution Brief on SANless Cluster Solutions for Virtual Server Environments
May 18, 2020	Solution Brief: High Availability Clusters for SAP in Linux Environments Solution Brief: High Availability Clusters for SAP in Linux Environments Enterprises need their business-critical SAP system to continue to operate through hardware failures, administrator errors, routine maintenance and site-wide disasters. Even brief periods of downtime for business critical SAP systems can have devastating consequences, including production and supply chain interruption, delivery delays, lost sales, payroll delays, customer service degradation, contractual liabilities and regulatory fines. However, SAP offers little or no native support for clustering, replication or disaster recovery functions and custom-developed Linux-based solutions can be expensive, complicated, and error-prone. SIOS Protection Suite™ for Linux software provides comprehensive SAP protection, including high availability, data replication, and disaster recovery in an easy, cost efficient solution. SIOS software supports both JAVA and ABAP versions of SAP servers running on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and accommodates a wide range of storage architectures. Easy Configuration Lets You Build a Cluster in Minutes SIOS software provides an intuitive, wizard-based interface that makes configuration and implementation of your SAP cluster easy. Continuous Monitoring of the Entire SAP Environment Unlike traditional clustering software that only checks that the server is alive, SIOS Protection Suite software monitors the health of the system and provides application aware high availability to ensure maximum uptime. SIOS software verifies that SAP is running, file shares or NFS exports are available, databases are mounted and available, and clients are able to connect. SIOS software actively monitors: servers, operating systems, SAP Primary Application Server (PAS) Instance, ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS) Instance, backend databases (Oracle, DB2, MaxDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL), SAP HANA, the SAP Central Services Instance (SCS), volumes or file systems, file shares or NFS mounts, IP and virtual IP, Enqueue and message servers, and Logical Volumes (LVM). Automatic or Manual Failover SIOS clusters can also stop and restart the application both locally and on another cluster server at either the same site or at another geographic location. When the SIOS software detects a problem, it automatically initiates one of three configurable recovery actions that will maximize uptime and protection for applications and data: it may attempt a restart on the same server; switchover to a standby server; or alert a system administrator. It performs both local recovery or complete failover quickly and easily. Eliminate Planned Downtime In addition to protecting against unplanned outages and downtime, you can use SIOS Protection Suite to eliminate downtime associated with planned maintenance by manually migrating services and client connections between systems. SAN or SANless Clusters SIOS Protection Suite for Linux offers two options for continuous data availability – SAN-based or SANless clusters. Use SIOS Protection Suite to create a SANless cluster by replicating from local storage on the active SAP Server to local storage on a standby server, using real time, blocklevel replication that can operate in either synchronous or asynchronous mode. In the event of a failure on the active server, SIOS software moves SAP operation to the standby server, providing high availability without a costly SAN. SIOS software lets you configure standby servers that are either local or remote over a LAN or WAN. With real-time replication, SIOS software delivers immediate recovery from a local system failure, because an identical copy of the data is maintained on the backup server. It also allows the creation of multiple real-time copies through one-to-many replication. SAP HANA Protection SIOS Protection Suite for Linux can be used to control SAP HANA System Replication, which replicates all data to a secondary SAP HANA node. In this SAP HANA scale-up configuration, data is constantly pre-loaded on the secondary SAP HANA node. SAP Disaster Recovery Disaster recovery and DR testing in SAP environments can be time consuming and result in significant data loss because the SAP databases need to be restored from the latest available backup. SIOS Protection Suite software eliminates these challenges by quickly and easily resuming SAP operations in the event of a disaster without data loss. The SIOS software makes DR testing easy by allowing administrators to move SAP to the DR site for testing and to move it back to the primary site when testing is done. It also lets you leave SAP in service in the primary site while completing DR testing with no impact to your production network by unlocking the target data, bringing SAP into service on the backup system to verify recovery. SIOS Protection Suite software makes SAP/Linux clusters easy to use and easy to own. Key Benefits Provide Superior Protection • Protects your entire SAP stack including HANA with high availability clustering, continuous data replication, and disaster recovery functionality • Enables single- and multi-site clusters using existing servers and storage Make Clusters Easy • Intuitive, wizard-driven GUI simplifies installation, configuration and management • Supports physical, virtual or cloud environments and a wide range of storage architectures Save Money • Eliminates the cost, complexity and single point of failure risk of SAN storage • Reduces data transfer costs in cloud environments • Efficient replication engine minimizes network traffic—without hardware accelerators or compression devices. • Saves labor cost by automating data replication tasks using an intuitive management console Download our Solution Brief High Availability Clusters for SAP in Linux Environments
May 17, 2020	Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments SIOS software provides a simple, cost-efficient way to provide high availability protection for SQL Server in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Add SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to a Windows Server Failover Clustering Environment such as SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) to create a cloud-friendly SANless cluster. Use AWS Quickstart deployment templates to create a SIOS SANless cluster in minutes. Fast, Cost-Efficient Way to Add High Availability Like all traditional failover clustering solutions, SQL Server FCI environments require the use of a shared storage. This requirement makes them impractical or impossible in public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services. SIOS SANless clustering software eliminates this requirement in an environment that is fully integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering. SIOS software adds the flexibility to protect your business critical applications such as SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition in Windows or Linux and any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Fast, Efficient Synchronization SIOS software uses highly efficient block-level replication to synchronize storage in all cluster nodes in realtime to create a SANless cluster. By replicating data volumes at the block level, SIOS software use significantly fewer system resources, makes more efficient use of the available bandwidth and transfers more data faster across than file-based replication alternatives. As a result, SIOS software delivers incredibly fast replication speeds—without hardware accelerators or compression devices. You get efficient storage without the cost or configuration limitations of a traditional SAN-based environment. Failover Across Availability Zones for Disaster Protection It keeps real-time copies of data synchronized across multiple nodes and across EC2 Availability Zones (AZs) for availability and disaster protection. High Availability with SQL Server Standard Edition SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software can be used with SQL Server Standard Edition FCI to create a cost-efficient high availability cluster without the need for more costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. Key Benefits Enables Clustering in the Cloud • Makes cluster failover protection in cloud environments possible by eliminating the need for shared storage. • Fully integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Protection for Applications and Data • High availability and disaster protection in a cloud environment. Ease of Use • AWS Quick Start deployment templates • Intuitive console for easy ongoing AWS monitoring and management. Download our Solution Brief High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments
May 15, 2020	Case Study: SIOS AppKeeper Gives Hobby Japan Peace of Mind and Enables Employees to Produce the Best Content Possible Case Study: SIOS AppKeeper Gives Hobby Japan Peace of Mind and Enables Employees to Produce the Best Content Possible SIOS Chosen for its Ability to Deliver both High Availability and High Performance “We cannot prevent configuration errors or load issues. But SIOS AppKeeper is very good for my peace of mind. With AppKeeper, our staff is not being called every time a system or server failure occurs,” said Yuichiro Fukabori of Hobby Japan. “Our goal is to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment and SIOS AppKeeper helps us do that.” Hobby Japan is a publishing company with diverse businesses related to hobbies (e.g. anime, action figure collecting, card games, etc.) that includes publishing young-adult books and magazines such as “Hobby Japan”, “Monthly Arms” and “Card Game.” The company also sells figures and character goods, game planning tools, and imports and selling analog games. Yuichiro Fukabori from the Public Relations, Business Administration department of Hobby Japan describes the company as “a general trading company that offers almost everything related to hobbies.” The Environment Hobby Japan does not have a dedicated IT department. Many of its employees hold multiple roles, and while he is a member of the public relations team, Mr. Fukabori also manages the company’s web servers. “Since there is no IT department within the company, I am in charge of the operation of all servers except those that are managed by each department,” said Mr. Fukabori. It is easy to imagine that he is in a difficult situation. Hobby Japan used to rely on a hosting services company to manage their web server, but they experienced a disaster when they had a hard drive failure. While they were able to eventually recover the data, the situation exposed that they needed better data backup and security processes. Cloud services were becoming more popular in Japan, so Mr. Fukabori led the effort to transition the company to the cloud. Hobby Japan migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2013. Thereby, freeing them from various problems they had experienced in the past. But website traffic started to increase steadily, putting pressure on their environment. Mr. Fokabori was tasked with addressing this issue. He needed something that could ensure high availability and high performance. The Challenge Hobby Japan was monitoring their EC2 environment with AWS Cloud Watch. But Mr. Fukabori was unable to respond properly when the webserver traffic spiked, such as when the Monthly Hobby Japan issue was posted. He only received a notification at the time of the server downtime. Moreover, he noted, ”When our content was introduced on a popular video site or our figures were posted on Twitter, we also experienced unexpected increases in server traffic, frequently resulting in more downtime,” he said. The company was experiencing systems issues about 10 times a month and Mr. Fukabori was busy addressing them. Alerts would often occur in the middle of the night, disturbing Mr. Fukabori’s sleep and home life. He thought, “I can’t handle this by myself” and asked AWS for help. AWS introduced Hobby Japan to ForgeVision, Inc, an AWS consulting partner that provides cloud integration services. ForgeVision proposed three improvements for High Availability and implemented them in August 2018. The first was to implement auto-scaling for Hobby Japan’s EC2 instances to enable an automatic and scalable response when access overload occurred. AWS Auto Scaling quickly stabilized their server operations. “Thanks to Auto Scaling, we did not have any trouble during our Summer animation broadcasting day in 2018 when many users accessed our server simultaneously,” said Mr. Fukabori. Monthly incidents were reduced from 10 times per month to one or two times per month, allowing him to return to a more normal lifestyle. The second improvement was the implementation of a visualization tool to allow Hobby Japan to check access status and resource utilization. And the third improvement was to reduce operational loads by introducing AWS operations management service. But Hobby Japan still had another issue. ForgeVision’s AWS operations and management services delivered systems failure notifications around the clock. But their team was only available to address issues between 10 AM and 6 PM on weekdays. Because website traffic often increased at night, Hobby Japan realized that they needed additional help to address this issue. “I don’t want to worry as much about the system or servers. If we could afford to, we would like to completely outsource the monitoring and management of our environment, but it would cost more,” said Mr. Fukabori. “We produce high-quality content, but that work will be in vain if we cannot provide it at the right timing due to server downtime. Therefore, we need a system environment that is as automated as possible.” ForgeVision suggested that Hobby Japan take a look at SIOS AppKeeper which would provide the high availability that it needed. The Evaluation Hobby Japan started using AppKeeper on the five websites they run. ”We understood the functionality and didn’t need to spend time on a special evaluation process. We started using it immediately,” said Mr. Fukabori. The Solution SIOS AppKeeper is offered as a cloud software-as-a-service solution that supports the automatic monitoring and restoration of AWS EC2 services and instances. It monitors them via the AWS API and detects and recovers from failures quickly. AppKeeper restores the application operation automatically by detecting and first restarting application services. This step typically restores services in seconds. If a restart of the service fails, it then restarts the entire instance. It issues a failure report that shows any failure occurrences and recoveries based on the relevant information obtained before and after the recovery from the virtual machine, services, and AWS. If customers select the EC2 Auto Scaling functionality, they can easily add more instances for AppKeeper protection. AppKeeper will scale to monitor these new instances in near real-time and, if desired, apply designated settings automatically. The Results Since most failures can be resolved by restarting the instance or rebooting the service, SIOS AppKeeper quickly addresses these issues. It provides peace of mind even at night when IT people cannot address the failures. Mr. Fukabori decided to implement SIOS AppKeeper at Hobby Japan in April 2019, with the anticipation that the solution would add a new sense of security in the operations management. SIOS AppKeeper hasn’t encountered any issues that it could not automatically recover from, giving Mr. Fukabori and his team the reassurance of knowing that they had a fail-safe mechanism to automatically recover their systems if a failure occurred. “Of course, human error can not be prevented, but the introduction of SIOS AppKeeper has been very good for my peace of mind,” said Mr. Fukabori. “I feel that we are one step closer to an environment where I can stay calm even when too many people are trying to access our popular content,” he said. “The ability to enable a maintenance-free, care-free environment at low cost is the SIOS AppKeeper’s advantage.” Learn more about SIOS AppKeeper to enjoy High Availability and High Performance Sign up for a Free Trial of SIOS DataKeeper Download Case Study PDF