Archives for December 2021

Windows Clustering

December 28, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Windows Clustering

How to Achieve High Availability in Windows

To mitigate system downtime and ensure high availability for Windows, IT best practice recommends that you cluster servers (or nodes) so that if one node fails, one or more other nodes automatically take over-processing. This is also referred to as Windows clustering.

Clustering software is required that monitors the health of the primary node and initiates recovery actions if it detects an issue. HA clustering also requires a way to ensure that, in the event of a failure, the secondary node is accessing the most current versions of data in storage. In most cases, this is achieved by connecting all nodes of the cluster to the same shared storage. The cluster nodes should be separated geographically to protect applications from sitewide and regional disasters.

In Windows Server environments, Microsoft includes Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) in the Windows Server platform.

What is Windows Server Failover Clustering?

With WSFC, each active node has a standby node that has the same hardware specifications and shares the same storage. A third node is often configured as a “witness” server whose sole purpose is to ensure that the primary node is operational and, if an issue is detected, to signal the need to failover operation to the standby node.

In addition to monitoring the health of the cluster, the nodes in a WSFC also work together to collectively provide:[1]

Resource management – Individual nodes provide physical resources such as SAN and network interfaces. The hosted applications are registered as a cluster resource and can configure startup and health dependencies upon other resources.
Failover coordination – Each resource is hosted on a primary node and can be automatically or manually transferred to one or more secondary nodes. Nodes and hosted applications are notified when failover occurs so that they can appropriately react. WSFC works with Microsoft Always On Availability Groups and Always On Failover Clustering to coordinate failover In Microsoft SQL Server environments.

How SIOS DataKeeper Complements WSFC

WSFC requires shared storage to ensure all cluster nodes are accessing the most up-to-date data in the event of a failover. Often, companies use expensive SAN hardware to assure data redundancy. SANs represent a single point of failure risk. And, if you want to run your application in the cloud with the same Windows Server Failover clustering protection, there is no SAN available.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition seamlessly integrates with and extends WSFC and SQL Server Always On Failover clustering by eliminating the need for shared storage. It provides performance-optimized, host-based replication to synchronize local storage in all cluster nodes, creating a SANless cluster. While WSFC manages the cluster, SIOS DataKeeper performs synchronous or asynchronous replication of the storage giving the standby nodes immediate access to the most current data in the event of a failover. SIOS DataKeeper not only eliminates the cost, complexity, and single-point-of-failure risk of a SAN, but also allows you to use the latest in fast PCIe Flash and SSD in your local storage for performance and protection in a single cost-efficient solution.

With SIOS DataKeeper, you can also balance network bandwidth and CPU utilization for each application.

If fast replication is critical, SIOS DataKeeper can achieve more than 90 percent bandwidth utilization to accelerate data synchronization.
If minimizing network impact is your top priority, SIOS DataKeeper offers integrated compression and bandwidth throttling.

In addition, SIOS DataKeeper’s Target Snapshots feature lets you run point-in-time reports from a secondary node to offload workloads that can impact performance on the primary node. This lets you query and run reports faster and make faster decisions.

Working with WSFC, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition protects business-critical Windows environments, including Microsoft SQL Server, SAP, SharePoint, Lync, Dynamics, and Hyper-V using your choice of industry-standard hardware and local attached storage in a “shared-nothing” or SANless configuration.[2] SIOS DataKeeper also provides high availability and disaster recovery protection for your business-critical applications in cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services without sacrificing performance.

SIOS Protection Suite – Protecting a Windows Environment Without WSFC

SIOS Protection Suite for Windows includes DataKeeper, SIOS LifeKeeper, and optional application Recovery Kits for leading application and infrastructure operations. It is a tightly integrated clustering solution that combines high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies to protect your business-critical applications and data from downtime and disasters.

Distributed metadata and notifications

The WSFC service and node’s metadata/status are hosted on each node in the cluster. When changes occur on any node, updated information is automatically propagated to all other nodes.

SIOS Protection Suite does not require WSFC as SIOS monitors the health of the application environment, including servers, operating systems, and databases. It can stop and restart an application both locally and on another cluster server at the same site or in another location. When a problem is detected, SIOS Protection Suite automatically performs the recovery actions and automatically manages cascading and prioritized failovers.

With SIOS Protection Suite, you can use your choice of SAN or SANless clusters using a wide array of storage devices, including direct-attached storage, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and more.

SIOS Protection Suite for Windows can meet your high availability and disaster recovery needs within a single site and across multiple sites.

Conclusion

SIOS provides offerings that support a breadth of applications, operating systems, and infrastructure environments, providing a single solution that can handle all your high availability needs. Here are just a few examples that demonstrate the power of SIOS.

Perth Stadium in Western Australia implemented SIOS DataKeeper with WSFC to provide high availability for their Hyper-V virtual machines.
PayGo (paygoutilities.com), based in the U.S., implemented SIOS DataKeeper with WSFC to provide high availability for SQL Server on AWS.
Toyo Gosei, based in Japan, implemented SIOS DataKeeper with WSFC to provide high availability and disaster recovery for their SAP application on Azure.

For more information on high availability/disaster recovery solutions to support your Windows environment click here [TM(1] .

References

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/24358/windows-clustering

https://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/definition/Windows-Server-failover-clustering

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/failover-clusters/windows/windows-server-failover-clustering-wsfc-with-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/failover-clusters/windows/windows-server-failover-clustering-wsfc-with-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15

[2] A shared-nothing architecture (SN) is a distributed-computing architecture in which each update request is satisfied by a single node (processor/memory/storage unit). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared-nothing_architecture

Reproduced from SIOS

Linux Clustering

December 23, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Linux Clustering

What is Linux Clustering?

A high availability Linux cluster is a group of Linux computers or nodes, storage devices that work together and are managed as a single system. In a traditional clustering configuration, two nodes are connected to shared storage (typically a SAN). With Linux clustering, an application is run on one node, and clustering software is used to monitor its operation. If the software detects an issue, it moves operation of the application to the secondary node in a process called failover. Since the secondary node shares storage with the primary, operation can continue quickly, meeting very short (seconds to minutes) recovery time and recovery point objectives.

Linux Open Source High Availability Clustering

Some Linux operating system vendors offer clustering software, such as SUSE Linux HAE; Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL); and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

While they allow you to create a failover cluster, they present a variety of challenges. First, choosing which software to use for each component of the HA configuration, which at a minimum, must include three related capabilities: data replication, server clustering and a resource manager with a heartbeat monitor. With SUSE and Red Hat, you are also locked into the OS. If you want to use other less expensive or free OS versions, such as CentOS or Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), you will need to buy a separate HA solution.

Whichever you choose, creating a Linux clustering solution with open source software for high availability is a “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) project, that is highly manual and prone to human error.

Linux open-source HA extensions require a high degree of technical skill, creating complexity and reliability issues that challenge most operators.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux both solutions offer both a SAN and SANless environment but require that a replication software called DRBD be installed and configured in the OS to support data replication in the SANless environment. Unfortunately, this requires heavy custom scripting, which can take a long time to test and validate and requires retesting when any updates are made to the environment. Since these companies are operating system companies first and foremost, their support is geared towards operating system-level issues and often there is little to no HA expertise to help a customer with their issues.

Oracle RAC is a high availability solution, but it is primarily architected for the database management tier. This means you will need a different HA solution for those components that do the monitoring, management, and recovery of your application tiers. Oracle RAC is also very expensive – requiring you to upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Edition in addition to paying for the RAC option – typically hundreds of thousands of dollars – when compared to other Linux clustering solutions, such as SIOS Protection Suite.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Clustering

The SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provides a tightly integrated combination of high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies, protecting your business-critical applications from downtime and disasters. While SIOS Protection Suite can operate in a SAN environment to support a traditional HA hardware-based cluster, the architecture takes a shared-nothing approach to server clustering allowing it to run SANless. It delivers a robust, versatile and easily configurable solution with automatic and manual failover/failback recovery policies for a wide variety of applications.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux includes:

SIOS LifeKeeper, which provides flexible failover clustering software that monitors the entire application stack
SIOS DataKeeper, which provides fast, efficient host-based, block-level data replication for mirroring local storage in a SANless cluster configuration or replicating to remote locations or cloud for disaster recovery
Multiple Application Recovery Kits (ARKs), with automated configuration and validation tools built into the product to protect your business-critical applications and data from downtime and disasters.

It is the SIOS’ team’s depth of knowledge in application recovery and the solution’s automation of application monitoring and recovery that makes it easier to use and a better, less expensive choice when compared to the Linux clustering solutions offered SUSE, Red Hat, and Oracle.

In addition, SIOS LifeKeeper supports 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. SIOS software has been adapted and optimized to run on these operating systems and the components are tested so ensure the SANless cluster solution will work on each OS.

Lastly, with the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, you can run your business-critical applications in a flexible, scalable cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) without sacrificing performance, high availability, or disaster protection.

Linux Clustering in AWS

While cloud providers, such as AWS, provide high availability options, they do not provide the level of high availability and breadth of protection across the whole application infrastructure that customers demand and that you once achieved by using clusters before cloud computing. That is why AWS is partnering with SIOS. SIOS Protection Suite for Linux achieves these desired levels of high availability for our mutual customers and the critical applications they are moving to the AWS cloud.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux on AWS provides all the elements you need to create a high availability Linux cluster in a virtual private cloud (VPC) within a single AWS Region across two Availability Zones. It also supports out-of-the-box protection for SAP systems, Oracle databases, and other business-critical applications.

SIOS and AWS offer SIOS Protection Suite Quickstart on AWS, which helps you create a fully configured and operational Linux high availability cluster in a few short steps. It sets up an AWS architecture for SIOS Protection Suite for Linux and deploys it into your AWS account in about half an hour. This Quick Start, available in the AWS Marketplace, is for enterprise users who want to deploy SIOS Protection Suite for Linux on AWS into their test or production environment.

SIOS Clustering for Linux

SIOS is a high availability company that has spent the past 20 years focused on delivering HA that is specifically designed for SAP, SQL, Linux, Oracle, and other applications. Its experience is built into its product, and installation and configuration take a fraction of the time and cost when compared to custom scripting with the Linux distributions. In addition, SIOS tests and validates new versions of operating systems and applications so its customers don’t have to. When a customer calls SIOS for support, they are connected to a high availability expert – someone who only focuses on HA and has been doing so for a very long time.

For more information, refer to the SIOS white paper, “Implementing High Availability in a Linux Environment.”

Additional References

https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/clustered-storage

Reproduced from SIOS

Failover Cluster

December 18, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Failover Cluster

Failover Cluster Software Solutions: What You Need to Know

What is Failover?

The “Tell All” on Failover

Failover is the process by which a standby, redundant system, database, or network assumes operations when the primary system, database, or network fails, or primary operations are abnormally terminated. Hot failover is one of the key design principles incorporated into high availability and disaster recovery systems.

RTO is the maximum tolerable duration of any outage. Online transaction processing applications generally have the lowest RTOs, and those that are mission-critical often have an RTO of only a few seconds.

RPO is the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated when a failure happens. For HA, RPO is often zero to specify there should be zero data loss under all failure scenarios

Let’s Understand Failover

First, we need to discuss the difference between cold, warm, and hot standby servers:

A cold server (sometimes referred to as a cold failover) is one that is not connected to the primary server but is available and turned on only when the primary server goes down. With a cold server, it can take considerable time to power up the standby server, which may require an updated configuration and software. This means that Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) are the longest. Cold failover is considered unacceptable for mission-critical applications.
A warm server/failover is one that periodically receives updates from the primary server through data replication and mirroring.
A hot server/failover is one that receives regular updates from the primary server and is immediately available to take over in the event of a failover. Hot failover is the most resource-intensive, results in zero data loss (zero RPO) and RPOs of no more than a few minutes and is required to support high availability for mission-critical applications.

SIOS Failover Cluster Software supports hot failovers, delivering a zero RPO and an RTO of milliseconds for high availability. The results: a system failure results in no data loss and is transparent to the user.

SIOS Failover Cluster Software

SIOS offers failover cluster software so you can build a traditional shared storage cluster for high availability or a SIOS SANless cluster that uses local storage. SIOS software uses real-time synchronous (for LAN environments) or asynchronous (for WAN environments) data replication to synchronize storage.

SIOS solutions provide high availability and disaster recovery with a single solution. This approach eliminates the cost and complexity of SAN-based replication. With the ability to replicate to multiple targets, you can configure a multi-node failover cluster with nodes located in multiple locations to protect your systems from disasters.

With SIOS clusters, you can replicate between the configurations of your choice – between SAN and SANless environments and any combination of physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid configurations. In fact, SIOS clustering solutions are unique in the breadth of operating systems, applications, and infrastructure environments supported, including Windows, Linux, SAP, SQL Server, Oracle, AWS, Azure, and Google cloud platforms.

SIOS failover — SIOS Failover Cluster Software uses efficient block-level replication to keep local storage synchronized, enabling the secondary nodes in your cluster to continue to operate after a failover with access to the most recent data.

In a Windows environment, SIOS DataKeeper gives you the flexibility to build a Windows cluster in any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition seamlessly integrates with and extends Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) by providing a performance-optimized, host-based data replication mechanism.

In a Linux environment, SIOS LifeKeeper and SIOS DataKeeper provide a tightly integrated combination of high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies, protecting your business-critical applications from downtime and disasters.

Let’s review one case study that talks to the benefits of one of SIOS’ solutions – SIOS DataKeeper.

A SIOS Failover Cluster Software Solution in Action

Located in The Netherlands, Van de Lande BR (VDL) manufactures a wide range of PVC and PE compression fittings and valves. Their products are used all over the world in industrial and technical installations. Manufacturing more than 4500 different products, VDL is deeply committed to product improvement and quality, making their brand the choice for builders of systems and installations for more than 50 years.

VDL has a Hyper-V environment, solid state disk (SSD) storage, and its business relies heavily on its ERP solution. With only one data processing system in place, VDL was exposed and needed a disaster recovery (DR) solution to ensure the protection and availability of its ERP, web services, and other mission-critical systems in the event of a disaster.

To deliver immediate failover and DR protection, VDL built a Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) system, with one node replicating data to the other node. If the primary node fails, WSFC transfers all operations to the standby node, giving users continuous access to applications and data.

VDL also chose SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to provide DR for its Hyper-V virtual machines (VM). SIOS DataKeeper is a software add-on that provides uninterrupted data access. It seamlessly integrates with WSFC to add performance-optimized, host-based, synchronous or asynchronous real-time replication of Hyper-V VMs between physical servers across both LAN and WAN connections. Working with WSFC, SIOS DataKeeper monitors the system and application health, maintains client connectivity, and makes it possible to create SANless clusters. Unlike a SAN, a SANless cluster eliminates single points of failure and reduces the cost and complexity of deploying clusters.

SIOS DataKeeper also uses WSFC to provide system administrators with a familiar and application-agnostic HA/DR solution, thereby dramatically simplifying implementation and operation.

VDL deployed two SIOS DataKeeper clusters; one two-node cluster works as a file server and iSCSI server while the other supports a SQL Server (ERP) cluster and Dynamics NAV web services. The implementation took less than one day. During the system failover test, the network services team failed over and failed back the system quickly and easily. After a thorough evaluation of the VDL server configuration and the completion of testing, the installation team confirmed that SIOS DataKeeper and a SANless cluster met all their criteria for disaster recovery, performance, and high availability of their ERP system, web services, and other mission-critical applications. The organization no longer risks data loss in the event of a failure.

One Last Thing

In addition to testing SIOS, VDL tested other solutions with unacceptable results. Comments Maurits van de Lande, ICT Manager at VDL, “We have tested our file server with both DFS replication and AlwaysOn technology. Neither delivered an automated disaster recovery solution to match SIOS DataKeeper, which fully addresses our DR requirements.”

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Regardless of your IT environment, your organization can reap the benefits of SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition and DataKeeper Standard Edition, both of which provide configuration flexibility, reduce data transfer costs, eliminate single points of failure, reduce complexities, and optimize network performance.

For more information, contact us or request a free trial.

References:

Reproduced from SIOS

Data Replication

December 13, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Data Replication

Real-Time Data Replication for High Availability

What is Data Replication

Data replication is the process by which data residing on a physical/virtual server(s) or cloud instance (primary instance) is continuously replicated or copied to a secondary server(s) or cloud instance (standby instance). Organizations replicate data to support high availability, backup, and/or disaster recovery. Depending on the location of the secondary instance, data is either synchronously or asynchronously replicated. How the data is replicated impacts Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

For example, if you need to recover from a system failure, your standby instance should be on your local area network (LAN). For critical database applications, you can then replicate data synchronously from the primary instance across the LAN to the secondary instance. 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).

In the event of a disaster, you want to be sure that your secondary instance is not co-located with your primary instance. This means you want your secondary instance in a geographic site away from the primary instance or in a cloud instance connected via a WAN. To avoid negatively impacting throughput performance, data replication on a WAN is asynchronous. This means that updates to standby instances will lag updates made to the active instance, resulting in a delay during the recovery process.

Why Replicate Data to the Cloud?

There are five reasons why you want to replicate your data to the cloud.

As we discussed above, cloud replication keeps your data offsite and away from the company’s site. While a major disaster, such as a fire, flood, storm, etc., can devastate your primary instance, your secondary instance is safe in the cloud and can be used to recover the data and applications impacted by the disaster.
Cloud replication is less expensive than replicating data to your own data center. You can eliminate the costs associated with maintaining a secondary data center, including the hardware, maintenance, and support costs.
For smaller businesses, replicating data to the cloud can be more secure especially if you do not have security expertise on staff. Both the physical and network security provided by cloud providers is unmatched.
Replicating data to the cloud provides on-demand scalability. As your business grows or contracts, you do not need to invest in additional hardware to support your secondary instance or have that hardware sit idle if business slows down. You also have no long-term contracts.
When replicating data to the cloud, you have many geographic choices, including having a cloud instance in the next city, across the country, or in another country as your business dictates.

Why Replicate Data Between Cloud Instances?

While cloud providers take every precaution to ensure 100 percent up-time, it is possible for individual cloud servers to fail as a result of physical damage to the hardware and software glitches – all the same reasons why on-premises hardware would fail. For this reason, organizations that run their mission-critical applications in the cloud should replicate their cloud data to support high availability and disaster recovery. You can replicate data between availability zones in a single region, between regions in the cloud, between different cloud platforms, to on-premise systems, or any hybrid combination.

SIOS Real-Time Data Replication for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

SIOS Datakeeper™ uses efficient, block-level, data replication to keep your primary and secondary instances synchronized. If a failover happens, the secondary instance(s) continues to operate, providing users with access to the most recent data. With SIOS solutions, RPO is always zero and RTO is dependent on the application but typically 30 seconds to a few minutes.

SIOS products uniquely protect any Windows- or Linux-based application operating in physical, virtual, cloud or hybrid cloud environments and in any combination of site or disaster recovery scenarios, enabling high availability and disaster recovery for applications such as SAP and databases, including Oracle, HANA, MaxDB, SQL Server, DB2, and many others. The “out-of-the-box” simplicity, configuration flexibility, reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of SIOS products set them apart from other clustering software.

In a Windows environment, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition seamlessly integrates with and extends Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) by providing a performance-optimized, host-based data replication mechanism. While WSFC manages the software cluster, SIOS performs the data replication to enable disaster protection and ensure zero data loss in cases where shared storage clusters are impossible or impractical, such as in cloud, virtual, and high-performance storage environments.

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Here is a real-world example of how one leading manufacturing company uses SIOS to create a high availability solution in the cloud using real-time data replication.

How to Achieve HA in a Cloud Environment with Real-Time Data Replication

Bonfiglioli is a leading Italian design, manufacturing, and distribution company, specializing in industrial automation, mobile machinery, and wind energy products and employing over 3,600 employees in locations around the globe. To run its business, the company relies on various mission-critical applications, including its SAP ERP system. The company’s IT infrastructure includes an on-premises VMware data center and a remote data center for business continuity and disaster protection. Since most of their applications run in a Windows environment, Bonfiglioli used guest-level Windows Server failover clustering in their VMware environment to provide high availability and disaster protection.

The company’s IT team implemented a program to move part of its IT operations into the Microsoft Azure cloud and to leverage Azure as their disaster recovery site. An important requirement of the company’s migration plan was to ensure the cloud architecture could provide better high availability protection than before and ensure Bonfiglioli could continue to meet its strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

In its on-premises environment, the company uses VMware clustering, which allows Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to manage failover to a secondary server in the event of an infrastructure failure. However, it was a challenge to provide this type of protection in the cloud because using guest-clustering with shared-bus disks is not a viable cloud solution. Creating a cluster in VMware using Raw Device Mapping and shared-bus disks (RDM) is challenging and creates limitations for backing up the virtual machines.

The Solution

After evaluating several solutions, Bonfiglioli chose SIOS DataKeeper as their cloud high availability and disaster recovery solution upon learning that SIOS DataKeeper is the only certified high availability clustering solution for SAP in a public cloud. In addition, Bonfiglioli’s management consulting partner, BGP, had experience with SIOS DataKeeper and knew that it is easy to install, transparent to the operating system, and a proven, highly effective solution.

With SIOS, the IT team fashioned a cluster environment without RDM. They created a two-node cluster in VMware and added SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to synchronize storage via real-time data replication in each cluster instance. In an on-premises environment, synchronized storage appears to WSFC as a single shared storage disk.

SIOS DataKeeper also provides high availability protection for the company’s SAP instance and eliminates single point of failure. Using SIOS DataKeeper, the IT team replicated an SSD-tiered disk partition in the company’s on-premises data center using real-time data replication. This allows Bonfiglioli to restore their virtual machines to Microsoft Azure in the event of a disaster.

The Results

Daniele Bovina, Systems Architect at Bonfiglioli, comments about the results, “SIOS DataKeeper gave us an easy way to move our business-critical SAP system to the Microsoft Azure cloud while meeting our stringent SLAs for availability, disaster recovery, and performance.”

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For more information about SIOS Clustering Solutions, contact us or request a free trial.

References

Reproduced from SIOS

Achieving IT Resilience with High Availability

December 8, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Achieving IT Resilience with High Availability

What is IT Resilience?

IT resilience is the ability of an organization to maintain acceptable service levels when there is a disruption of business operations, critical processes, or your IT ecosystem. In this digital age, high availability is critical to your organization’s success. Your customers won’t tolerate a downed website. And you cannot afford a downed ERP, CRM, or other business-critical system either. This is where high availability comes in.

Your organization must “check the boxes” on many different technologies and solutions to ensure IT resiliency – not the least among them is ensuring, at a minimum, that you have backup, disaster recovery, cyber resilience, and high availability solutions in place. For purposes of this article, we will be talking about high availability (HA) as one of the key elements required to ensure IT resiliency.

What is High Availability?

High availability systems ensure that business operations continue – with total transparency to customers and users – when your system, applications, and network goes down. HA is a component of a technology system that eliminates single points of failure to ensure continuous operations or uptime for an extended period. Highly available systems incorporate five design principles: automatic failover, automatic detection of application-level failures, no data loss, automatic and quick fail over to redundant components, and push-button failover and failback for planned maintenance.

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IT Resilience and High Availability – A Non-Example!

This past August, Nissan Group’s data center in Denver crashed because of a power outage. The system impacted was known internally as NNANet. It is a Nissan solution used by employees to order cars/parts, manage product rebate sales, get info on vehicle recalls, file warranty claims needed to price and start service work, and getting financing information. NNANet is described as Nissan’s lifeblood because everything Nissan does goes through NNANet.

The system remained down for four days, impacting operations at many retailers and production systems at two factories. The company, its retailers, and customers were all impacted.

The Impact

Clearly, this is an example where correctly configured, properly located high availability systems would have saved the day or at least minimized the impact of the crash. What was a high availability situation literally turned in to a disaster for Nissan as “commerce among consumers, retailers, distribution networks, manufacturing plants and finance companies.” were all affected for four days.[1] Nissan reset dealer sales goals by 10 percent for the month as a result of the crash. The total financial impact for Nissan and its dealers/retailers/partners remains to be seen.

IT Resilience– A Real-World Example!

Cayan™ is the leading provider of payment technologies and its Genius Customer Engagement Platform® aggregates and integrates every conceivable transaction technology, payment type, and customer program – both present and future – into a single platform. The Genius platform, as well as other mission-critical applications at Cayan, run on SQL Server.

Cayan customers include some of the world’s largest online retailers, companies with no tolerance for downtime. “Our top priority is ensuring that our customers can complete transactions continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Paul Vienneau, Chief Technology Officer, Cayan.

Cayan needed a high availability and disaster recovery system for their SQL Server database. The company considered a traditional shared storage cluster, but a SAN solution was expensive, complicated to manage, and introduced risk associated with a single point of failure.

For these reasons, Cayan IT staff decided to use SIOS #SANLess clusters. SANLess clusters use local storage so there is minimal performance overhead and fast application response times. The SIOS software, SIOS DataKeeper, is integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). SIOS uses efficient, real-time, data replication to synchronize local storage in the primary and remote cluster nodes, making them appear to WSFC as a virtual SAN.

The Impact

Since deploying SIOS SANless clusters, Cayan has not experienced any downtime or data loss. Comments Paul Vienneau, CTO, “We are very pleased with the SIOS DataKeeper software. It met or exceeded our expectations. Implementation and ongoing administration were easy, and we have had zero downtime since we implemented our SIOS SANLess clusters.”

There are no customer satisfaction issues to report, no lost revenues, no unproductive employees, no disruption to the business.

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SIOS: Achieve IT Resilience with High Availability

SIOS DataKeeper™ uses efficient block-level replication to keep local storage synchronized, enabling the secondary nodes in your cluster to continue to operate after a failover with access to the most recent data.

SIOS products uniquely protect any Windows- or Linux-based application operating in physical, virtual, cloud or hybrid cloud environments and in any combination of site or disaster recovery scenarios, enabling high availability and disaster recovery for applications such as SAP S/4HANA and databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and many others. The “out-of-the-box” simplicity, configuration flexibility, reliability, performance, and cost effectiveness of SIOS products set them apart from other clustering software.

In a Windows environment, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition seamlessly integrates with and extends Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) by providing a performance-optimized, host-based data replication mechanism. While WSFC manages the software cluster, SIOS performs the replication to enable disaster protection and ensure zero data loss in cases where shared storage clusters are impossible or impractical, such as in cloud, virtual, and high-performance storage environments.

In a Linux environment, SIOS LifeKeeper™ and SIOS DataKeeper for Linux provides a tightly integrated combination of high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies, protecting your business-critical applications from downtime and disasters.

Whether you are in a Windows or Linux environment, SIOS products free your IT team from the complexity and challenges of creating and managing high availability computing infrastructures. They provide the intelligence, automation, flexibility, high availability, and ease-of-use IT managers need to protect business-critical applications from downtime or data loss.

SIOS = IT Resilience with HA + DR

Backup, high availability, disaster recovery, and cyber resilience are all important elements in achieving IT resilience. With SIOS solutions, you can “check the box” for both high availability and disaster recovery – two solutions in one. With the ability to replicate to multiple targets, you can configure a multi-node failover cluster with nodes located in multiple locations to protect your systems from failures and disasters.

For more information, and to ensure IT resilience for your organization, get a free demo of SIOS today.

References:

Reproduced with permission from SIOS