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Cloud Computing Magazine: SIOS SANLess Clustering Software Provides Epicure Selections with High Availability and Disaster Recovery Protection for Critical SQL Server Applications

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SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Epicure Selections is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to easily and cost-efficiently provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses.

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants. Epicure relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.

The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition, one for each website running on a single server. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure.

As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. As part of this update, Epicue wanted an efficient, cost-effective way to provide high availability and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition.

Using SIOS SANLess clustering software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SIOS SANLess clusters and configured them using the software’s intuitive graphical user interface.

The SIOS software provides Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

“Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within an organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, you need to protect applications, like Windows SQL Server, from downtime if the cloud instance or the cloud provider fails,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology. “Epicure is using SIOS to provide a fast, easy way to deploy applications in a high availability environment in the cloud while continuing to use Windows Server Failover Clustering. I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own. An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™ to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Read More on Cloud Computing.

Disaster Recovery Journal: SIOS SANLess Clustering Software Provides Epicure Selections with High Availability and Disaster Recovery Protection for Critical SQL Server Applications

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Epicure Selections deploys hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud

SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Epicure Selections is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to easily and cost-efficiently provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses.

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants.  Epicure relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.

The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition, one for each website running on a single server. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure.

As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. As part of this update, Epicure wanted an efficient, cost-effective way to provide high availability and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition.

Using SIOS SANLess clustering software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SIOS SANLess clusters and configured them using the software’s intuitive graphical user interface.

The SIOS software provides Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

“Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within an organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, you need to protect applications, like Windows SQL Server, from downtime if the cloud instance or the cloud provider fails,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology.  “Epicure is using SIOS to provide a fast, easy way to deploy applications in a high availability environment in the cloud while continuing to use Windows Server Failover Clustering.  I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own.An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.

Read more at the Disaster Recovery Journal.

IT Briefcase: SIOS SANLess Clustering Software Provides Epicure Selections with High Availability and Disaster Recovery Protection for Critical SQL Server Applications

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SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Epicure Selections is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to easily and cost-efficiently provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses.

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants.  Epicure relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.

The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition, one for each website running on a single server. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure.

As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. As part of this update, Epicure wanted an efficient, cost-effective way to provide high availability and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition.

Using SIOS SANLess clustering software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SIOS SANLess clusters and configured them using the software’s intuitive graphical user interface.

The SIOS software provides Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

“Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within an organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, you need to protect applications, like Windows SQL Server, from downtime if the cloud instance or the cloud provider fails,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology.  “Epicure is using SIOS to provide a fast, easy way to deploy applications in a high availability environment in the cloud while continuing to use Windows Server Failover Clustering.  I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own.An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™ to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.

Read more at IT Briefcase

Tech Target: SIOS SANLess cluster helps keep Epicure websites up and running

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Direct-sales food distributor Epicure deployed a new server cluster to keep its websites from being overwhelmed — and saved money on SQL Server and storage in the process.

Traffic on the two primary websites operated by Canadian direct-sales food distributor Epicure went up substantially at the end of each month — so much that the spikes often made the sites unusable. Epicure tried working with the third-party vendor that hosts the sites to resolve the problem, but saw no improvement. And the North Saanich, British Columbia company’s business model is dependent on the two sites. It uses one website to market itself and its selection of food and cookware products; the other site is used by the independent “consultants” who sell the Epicure products at tasting parties to place orders and communicate with the company.

Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure, looked for a way to keep the sites running smoothly through the end-of-month rush — and, while doing a Google search last year, he found SIOS Technology Corp. and its DataKeeper data replication software andSANLess clustering tools. The SIOS offerings enable users looking to guard against processing downtime to create Windows or Linux server clusters that utilize local storage only, avoiding the need to deploy a storage area network (SAN).

“Before that, I thought we required a SAN,” Born said. SIOS also supports SAN-based clusters, but Epicure would have faced some difficulties if [it] went that route,” he added. According to Born, a SAN leads to higher costs and more setup effort; it also creates a “single point of failure,” since the entire operation becomes dependent on it to function. To combat that, Born could have deployed multiple SANs, but he said doing so would have become prohibitively expensive.

No backup in case of outage

Epicure had another good reason to want to bolster its websites, which use SQL Server to process and fulfill orders and track the work of its consultants. Shortly before Born learned about SIOS, Epicure’s data center suffered an outage that lasted several hours. “We didn’t have redundant Web servers, so there was no failover externally,” he said.The company had two servers, one for each site, and both were reaching their resource limit, which contributed to the end-of-month performance problems. In addition to SIOS, Born turned to cloud computing vendorAmazon Web Services (AWS) to help relieve the pressure. The new setup for Epicure includes a primary Web server running on-premises and a cloud-based failover system, and the SIOS software replicating data between them. Concurrently, Epicure is upgrading from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012, and from Windows 2008 to Windows 2012.Jerry Melnick, COO of San Mateo, Calif.-based SIOS, said one of the primary motivators for the deployment was Epicure’s concerns about disaster protection and recovery. “There is so much depending on those sites,” he said. “Users are ordering off the sites. If they go down, it could take weeks to get [them] back up.”One method for ensuring high availability is to deploy servers in a second location so that, if the primary data center goes down, you can failover to the backup one. But Melnick said that has a high startup cost, so he recommended companies like Epicure tap into a cloud provider, such asAWS, for disaster recovery. SIOS’ job, according to Melnick, is to be the linchpin of the SANLess cluster.

More money left on Epicure’s table

Consolidating the two servers into one primary system also saved the company some money on the DataKeeper software. “SIOS’ licenses are based on the number of servers, so it was half the cost,” Born said.

Also, prior to working with SIOS, Epicure had been using SQL Server Enterprise Edition solely because that was the only way to get the high-availability features included in the database. Now that Epicure is using the SIOS software, Born said it has been able to downgrade to the much less-expensive SQL Server Standard Edition, achieving “very substantial cost savings” on that as well.

Born started out with some reservations about the SIOS technology. “I did have concerns initially that if SIOS lost its data connection, there would be some corruption,” he said. “But we didn’t see that.” In fact, he was able to work out all of the startup issues with the SQL Server version of DataKeeper while testing the product, and only needed to make a couple calls to SIOS support. “It migrated over seamlessly,” Born said, adding that so far, he’s pleased with what the SIOS software has done for Epicure’s websites and the SQL Server systems that power them.Jessica Sirkin is associate site editor of SearchSQLServer. Email her at jsirkin@techtarget.com and follow us on Twitter: @SearchSQLServer.

Read more on TechTarget.com

Marketwatch: SIOS Technology Webinar to Reveal Steps for Achieving High Availability for SQL in VMware While Maximizing IT Flexibility

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 SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced a live webinar that will detail how to implement high availability (HA) protection for SQL in a VMware environment without sacrificing IT flexibility or data mobility features.

The live webinar “High Availability for SQL in VMware without Raw Device Mapping” will be held on Thurs, January 15, 2015 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST presented by SIOS Technology Director of Field Engineering/SIOS clustering expert Tony Tomarchio.

To register, please visit here: http://us.sios.com/2015-01-webinar-vmware

Using traditional shared storage clusters for high availability in a VMware environment requires the use of Raw Device Mapping (RDM) which limits IT configurations and does not support important VMware features, such as Vmotion. In this webinar, Tony Tomarchio will demonstrate easy steps to create a failover cluster without RDM to protect SQL without sacrificing IT flexibility or VMware features.

At SIOS Technology, Tony Tomarchio is responsible for defining and delivering technical pre-sales services, support and best practices to SIOS customers, prospects and partners. Tony has more than a decade of experience providing systems management and high availability solutions to enterprise customers.

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own. An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE: SIOS Technology Corp.

Winkowski Public Relations, LLC for SIOS
Beth Winkowski, 978-649-7189
bethwinkowski@US.SIOS.com

Copyright Business Wire 2015

Read more at Marketwatch.com