SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

Virtual Strategy Magazine — SIOS Technology Shortlisted for 2014-15 Cloud Awards Program

by Leave a Comment

SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, has been named a finalist in the 2014-2015 Cloud Awards Program in the category Best Cloud Infrastructure.

With awards for excellence and innovation in cloud computing, the cloud computing awards program accepts entries from across the entire globe, including the US, Canada, Australasia and EMEA. Now in its fourth year, entries are accepted from organizations of any size, and include start-ups and government bodies. In 2014-15, new categories include Data Innovation of the Year, “Best in Mobile” Cloud Solution, Most Promising Start-Up and Best Software as a Service.

Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology, said: “For SIOS to be shortlisted in the Best Cloud Infrastructure category of the 2014-15 Cloud Awards program is a special honor. We feel privileged to be recognized among the other nominees.”

Over 300 organizations entered, with entries coming from across the globe, covering the Americas, Australia, Europe and the Middle East.

Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson said: “The standard of entries to this year’s program has been truly staggering – so much so that even after culling hundreds of organizations from our consideration, our shortlist is still longer than ever before. We’ve been very impressed with how the Cloud ecosystem has evolved by the end of 2014 and these best-of-breed organizations are knocking it out of the park in terms of performance. These technologies aren’t going away: leverage them now or ignore them at your peril. When the dust has settled on what promises to be the most diverse and dynamic field of candidates yet, nobody knows what the 2015-16 Cloud Awards program will bring next year aside from continued excellence.”

Final winners will be announced on Tuesday 27 January 2015. This will not be the end of the process, with a public vote announced on this date to decide who will win the Cloud Computing Organization of the Year Award.

The Cloud Awards (http://www.cloud-awards.com/) will return in 2015-16 for a fresh awards program seeking excellence in cloud computing.

About the Cloud Awards

The Cloud Awards is an international program which has been recognizing and honoring industry leaders, innovators and organizational transformation in cloud computing since 2011. The awards are open to large, small, established and start-up organizations from across the entire globe, with an aim to find and celebrate the pioneers who will shape the future of the Cloud as we move into 2015 and beyond. Categories include the Software as a Service award, Most Promising Start-Up, and “Best in Mobile” Cloud Solution. Finalists were selected by a judging panel of international industry experts. For more information about the Cloud Awards please visithttp://www.cloud-awards.com/.

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.

Originally posted on Virtual Strategy Magazine on 12/17/2014.

Mercury News — SIOS Technology Shortlisted for 2014-15 Cloud Awards Program

by Leave a Comment

SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, has been named a finalist in the 2014-2015 Cloud Awards Program in the category Best Cloud Infrastructure.

With awards for excellence and innovation in cloud computing, the cloud computing awardsprogram accepts entries from across the entire globe, including the US, Canada, Australasia and EMEA. Now in its fourth year, entries are accepted from organizations of any size, and include start-ups and government bodies. In 2014-15, new categories include Data Innovation of the Year, “Best in Mobile” Cloud Solution, Most Promising Start-Up and Best Software as a Service.

Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology, said: “For SIOS to be shortlisted in the Best Cloud Infrastructure category of the 2014-15 Cloud Awards program is a special honor. We feel privileged to be recognized among the other nominees.”

Over 300 organizations entered, with entries coming from across the globe, covering the Americas, Australia, Europe and the Middle East.

Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson said: “The standard of entries to this year’s program has been truly staggering – so much so that even after culling hundreds of organizations from our consideration, our shortlist is still longer than ever before. We’ve been very impressed with how the Cloud ecosystem has evolved by the end of 2014 and these best-of-breed organizations are knocking it out of the park in terms of performance. These technologies aren’t going away: leverage them now or ignore them at your peril. When the dust has settled on what promises to be the most diverse and dynamic field of candidates yet, nobody knows what the 2015-16 Cloud Awards program will bring next year aside from continued excellence.”

Final winners will be announced on Tuesday 27 January 2015. This will not be the end of the process, with a public vote announced on this date to decide who will win the Cloud Computing Organization of the Year Award.

The Cloud Awards (http://www.cloud-awards.com/) will return in 2015-16 for a fresh awards program seeking excellence in cloud computing.

About the Cloud Awards

The Cloud Awards is an international program which has been recognizing and honoring industry leaders, innovators and organizational transformation in cloud computing since 2011. The awards are open to large, small, established and start-up organizations from across the entire globe, with an aim to find and celebrate the pioneers who will shape the future of the Cloud as we move into 2015 and beyond. Categories include the Software as a Service award, Most Promising Start-Up, and “Best in Mobile” Cloud Solution. Finalists were selected by a judging panel of international industry experts. For more information about the Cloud Awards please visit http://www.cloud-awards.com/.

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.

Originally posted on Mercury News on 12/17/2014

Storage Switzerland: Live Webinar – Flexible HA and DR for Virtual Server and Cloud Environments

by Leave a Comment

Moving business critical applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server, to virtual server and cloud environments, requires high availability and a solid disaster protection plan. The question often asked — will implementing that protection eliminate the cost savings and configuration flexibility you gain in these environments? This webinar will simplify the confusing array of availability and redundancy features offered in Windows Server Failover Clustering, SQL Server, and leading cloud and virtual server software vendors. Participants will learn how to protect SQL Server and other Windows applications from downtime and disasters, all the while ensuring configuration flexibility and infrastructure efficiency.

Click to register for the live webinar "Flexible HA and DR For Virtual Server and Cloud Environments"

These capabilities are becoming increasingly critical given that fact that many organizations are leveraging virtualized server infrastructure in tandem with off-site replication to cloud data centers to lower DR infrastructure costs and to improve application resiliency. But many legacy clustering technologies are not “cloud aware”. Instead they rely on access to shared storage resources like SANs to enable application fail-over.

Those environments that don’t have shared storage may have to invest in a six figure SAN, in addition to the clustering software licenses, just to attain the high availability that their applications require. Another challenge is that cloud storage generally can’t be shared out across multiple servers. Instead, it is typically allocated out on a per virtual machine basis, which means that the cloud can’t be used as an application fail-over target with some clustering offerings.

These two architectural limitations – the requirement to use shared storage and the lack of cloud storage awareness, can severely restrict the ability of application owners to obtain affordable, high availability and DR resiliency for their most critical business systems. This webinar will discuss how businesses can implement easy to manage, application-clustering technology utilizing commodity disk with public or hybrid cloud storage to get low-cost, application high availability.

All registrants will also be able to access Storage Switzerland’s extensive library of on-demand webinars, many with exclusive white papers, without having to re-register. As is always the case with a Storage Switzerland webinar, we will leave plenty of time for questions and answers. Get your specific questions answered or just listen in to hear what your IT peers are struggling with and the solutions we recommend.

Originally posted on Storage Switzerland on 11/18/2014.

 

IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with SIOS Technology: SAN-based vs. Cloud Clusters

by Leave a Comment

In this interview,  Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology discusses the difference between SAN-based and Cloud data storage clusters, and the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.

SAN-based clusters have been the traditional way to protect critical applications and data. Is this still the case?
Traditional clusters based on shared storage (typically SAN) are no longer the de facto choice for providing high availability and disaster protection for business critical applications. Companies are finding new ways to combine physical, virtual, and cloud environments into new configurations to control costs and stay agile in today’s demanding marketplace. In these environments, traditional SAN-based clusters have significant drawbacks. SAN storage can be costly to buy and require specialized skills to manage. They also introduce the risks of a single point of failure. In addition, shared storage is not typically offered in public cloud environments. In these environments, SANLess clusters that provide the same level of protection without requiring shared storage are often a better option.

Can you create a cluster in the cloud?
Yes, in a Windows environment, you can use native Windows Server Failover Clustering to create a cluster in a cloud by simply adding SANLess clustering software. You can locate cluster nodes in geographically separated instances in public cloud environments for disaster protection. The software synchronizes local storage on source and target nodes in the cloud, making them appear to the WSFC as shared storage. If a failure occurs, WSFC moves the application operation to the remote node in the same way it does in a traditional shared storage cluster.

What technologies are available to reduce the financial burden of SAN administration and deliver the flexibility data centers need today?
SANLess clusters reduce the financial burden of traditional shared storage clusters in severael ways. They eliminate the significant hardware cost of SAN storage. They eliminate the labor cost of specialized SAN administration. \ SANLess clusters also support local SSD storage, enabling high performance and high availability for a fraction of the cost of a SAN-based cluster.

How can a SANLess cluster make providing disaster protection easier?
A SANLess cluster solution lets you implement disaster protection without the need for identical SAN hardware in both your primary and disaster recovery locations. You can replicate between any two environments physical, virtual, or cloud for disaster protection. For example, you can maintain a SAN or SANLess cluster at your primary data center and add a node in a public cloud for disaster recovery. This configuration not only saves the cost of SAN storage, but also the cost of building out a remote data center.

You can create SANLess clusters in a public cloud with nodes in separate geographic zones or even in two different public cloud provider environments, such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure for protection from local, regional, and even provider-wide outages.

Do traditional high availability clusters have an impact on application performance?
Because SAN-based clusters are typically optimized for capacity rather than performance, SANs can slow performance of highly transactional applications, such as SQL Server and Oracle databases. SAN performance can lag behind new, faster server CPUs, causing idle server time, slower application response times, and a potentially costly loss of productivity. Because SANLess environments access disk installed locally, there is no latency and no loss of performance in servers with even the fastest CPUs. As noted above, you can also use SANLess clusters with cost-efficient local high performance SSD storage.

Can you use a SANLess cluster in a virtual server environment?
Yes you can. In fact, SANLess clusters eliminate the limitations imposed when you use traditional shared storage based technology for clustering VM’s in a virtual environment. When using traditional shared storage clustering in virtual server environments, you need to use using Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) or Pass-through disks. This is a complex storage setup that limits desirable virtual machine functionality and mobility such as VMotion/Live Migration. In contrast, SANLess clustering supports all of the flexibility and agility offered in the virtual environment. It does this by allowing you to use virtual disks native to the hypervisor such as VMDK’s or VHDs thereby eliminating the need for RDM or Pass-through configurations.

What if I already have a SAN?
If you have already made the investment in SAN storage, you can continue to use it and protect your business critical applications with a SAN-based cluster. However, you may want to extend the cluster up into a cloud environment as a simple, cost-efficient way to protect your business critical applications from disasters without the need for a remote data center or disaster recovery site. Replicating from a cluster node connected to a SAN to another cluster node in the cloud can allow you to configure a multi-site WSFC failover between both environments with nodes in more than one geographic location for protection against local, regional and national disasters.

What is SIOS SAN and SANLess clustering software?
SIOS SAN and #SANLess clustering software provides the flexibility to build clusters your way to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment and in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. SIOS’ unique #SANLess clustering allow you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared-SAN storage.

Jmelnick 4x6 hi res IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with SIOS Technology: SANS based vs. Cloud Clusters

Jerry Melnick
COO, SIOS Technology Corp.

Jerry Melnick is responsible for defining corporate strategy and operations at SIOS Technology Corp. (http://www.us.sios.com), maker of SIOS SAN and #SANLess cluster software. He more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software industries. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Beloit College with graduate work in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Boston University.

IT Business Edge: The Cloud and the Enterprise: Which Needs the Other More?

by Leave a Comment

Ever since the cloud burst onto the IT consciousness, the primary focus of most organizations has been to prepare for this new data paradigm. The thinking has been that the enterprise needs to be ready for the cloud or risk being left behind.

Lately, however, we’ve seen a subtle shift in attitude on the part of both the enterprise and the nascent cloud industry: It’s not the enterprise that needs to adapt to the cloud, but the cloud that needs to adapt to the enterprise. Across the board, from the large players like Amazon and Google to smaller ones like CloudSigma and DigitalOcean, the goal has shifted from providing the commodity resources that appeal to consumers to more specialized offerings that the enterprise values.

To be sure, there is no shortage of enterprise interest in the cloud already. According to IDG, nearly 70 percent of organizations today utilize cloud-based infrastructure or applications in some way, and IT spending on the cloud is currently averaging about 20 percent growth per year. The thing is, the vast majority of that activity consists of low-level workloads and bulk storage applications that generally go to the lowest bidder, which is usually one of the hyperscale players that can shave margins to the bone and still turn out a decent profit.

The real money in the enterprise can be found in higher-level, mission-critical services, and this is where the cloud has fallen short so far. A key cloud requirement for the enterprise is the support of mobile applications, which tend to feature more collaborative and data-sharing capabilities than standard workplace apps. However, according to a recent report from Netskope, nearly 90 percent of mobile-facing cloud apps are deemed unfit for the enterprise, primarily because they lack proper security and data protection. Indeed, more than one-third of all data policy violations are now taking place on smartphones and tablets, which is a testament to the growing popularity of these devices in the enterprise but also to the fact that they pose a substantial risk to vital data.

To gain mission-critical business from the enterprise, cloud providers will have to answer three questions, says SIOS Technology Corp.’s Jerry Melnick. First, how can they provide high availability and disaster protection without shared storage clusters? Second, will HA and DR capabilities inhibit the flexibility that the cloud is supposed to provide? And third, can the cloud support critical apps and data without adding risk, complexity and performance overhead? One possible solution to all this is the SANless cluster, which provides the failover and synchronization that the enterprise requires but on a more efficient software footing suitable for cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Strategy

Of course, the question of mission-critical support is also the reason why so many organizations are bent on the deployment of hybrid cloud solutions. This is seen as a lifeline to leading platform providers like Hitachi Data Systems, which otherwise face a steadily diminishing market as cloud providers increasingly turn to commodity hardware solutions. With a hybrid cloud, the enterprise still maintains a fair amount of internal data infrastructure, some of which will require specialized hardware that provides the security and availability on which the enterprise has come to rely. In this way, the public cloud acts as a template for what the enterprise can do privately, with an entire class of systems and services designed to bridge the two sides to form a singular, integrated environment.

Still, as Robert Burns wrote: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” (Oft go awry, for those whose Scots dialect is a little rusty.) Right now, the entire data center industry is in a state of flux, and cloud providers are keenly aware of the need to tap into the lucrative enterprise market. This is certainly an opportunity for traditional enterprise vendors, but it also serves the new generation of startups that are not quite so interested in preserving the status quo.

Arthur Cole writes about infrastructure for IT Business Edge. Cole has been covering the high-tech media and computing industries for more than 20 years, having served as editor of TV Technology, Video Technology News, Internet News and Multimedia Weekly. His contributions have appeared in Communications Today and Enterprise Networking Planet and as web content for numerous high-tech clients like TwinStrata, Carpathia and NetMagic.