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Disaster Recovery Journal: SIOS Spotlights 5 Myths about Cloud HA and DR

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SAN MATEO, Calif. – Enterprises are moving more and more applications to the cloud. The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner, Inc. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

“While the benefits of the cloud may be clear for applications that can tolerate brief periods of downtime, for mission-critical applications, such as SQL Server, Oracle and SAP, companies need a strategy for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protection,” said Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and SANless clustering software. “While traditional SAN-based clusters are not possible in these environments, SANless clusters can provide an easy, cost-efficient alternative.”

According to Gartner, IT service failover automation provides end-to-end IT service startup, shutdown and failover operations for disaster recovery (DR) and continuous availability. It establishes ordering and dependency rules as well as IT service failover policies. The potential business impact of this emerging technology is high, reducing the amount of spare infrastructure that is needed to ensure DR and continuous availability, as well as helping ensure that recovery policies work when failures occur, thus improving business process uptimeii.

Jerry Melnick says separating the truths and myths of HA and DR in cloud deployments can dramatically reduce data center costs and risks. He debunks these five myths:

Myth #1 – Clouds are HA Environments. Public cloud deployments, particularly with leading cloud providers, are high availability environments where application downtime is negligible.

  • The Truth – Redundancy is not the same as HA.  Some cloud solutions offer some measure of data protection through redundancy. However, applications such as SQL Server and file servers still need additional configuration for automating and managing high availability and disaster recovery.
  • The Truth – You can provide high availability protection for Windows applications in a cloud simply by adding SANless cluster software as an ingredient and configuring a WSFC environment. The SANless software synchronizes local storage in the cloud through real-time, block level replication, providing applications with immediate access to current data in the event of a failover.

Myth #2 – Protecting business critical applications in a cloud with a cluster is impossible without shared storage.You cannot provide HA for Windows applications in a cloud using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to create a cluster because it requires a shared storage device, such a SAN. A SAN to support WSFC is not offered in public clouds, such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.

Myth #3 – Remote replication isn’t needed for DR. Applications and data are protected from disaster in the cloud without additional configuration. 

  • The Truth – Cloud providers experience downtime and regional disasters like any other large organization. While providing high availability within the cloud will protect data centers from normal hardware failures and other unexpected outages within an availability zone (Amazon) or fault domain (Azure), data centers still need to protect against regional disasters. The easiest solution is to configure a multisite (geographically separated) cluster within a cloud and extend it by adding an additional node(s) in an alternate datacenter or different geographic region.
  • The Truth: Companies can use the

Myth #4 – Using the cloud is “all or nothing.”

Myth #5 – HA in a cloud has to be costly and complicated.

  • The Truth: A cluster for high availability in a cloud can be easily created using SANless clustering software with an intuitive configuration interface that lets users create a standard WSFC in a cloud without specialized skills. SANless clustering software also eliminates the need to buy costly enterprise edition versions of Windows applications to get high availability and added disaster protection or as described in Myth 4, to eliminate the need to build out a remote recovery site.

iGartner Says Cloud Computing Will Become the Bulk of New IT Spend by 2016.(http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2613015)

iiGartner Hype Cycle for IT Service Continuity Management, 2014.  September 10, 2104.  Analysts:  John P Morency, Carl Claunch, Pushan Rinnen

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.

Computer Technology Review: Survey Says Providing High Availability and Disaster Protection for SQL Server Poses Challenges for Enterprise Data Centers

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In many enterprise data centers, SQL Server is playing an increasingly important role in running core business operations, including customer service, order processing, payroll, accounting, and many more. For these organizations tolerance for SQL downtime and data loss is approaching zero. However, according to a recent survey by SIOS Technology Corp., providing the high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) needed to protect SQL Server from downtime presents a variety of challenges, including the rising cost of SQL licensing (71 percent), the cost of SAN storage (68 percent), and SAN configuration limitations (69 percent).

These challenges will only worsen as more applications are moved from physical server environments to virtual, cloud and hybrid cloud environments, where traditional SAN-based clusters are impractical. A simple change, such as adding SANless clustering software to a traditional cluster configuration can provide the flexibility and cost-saving features needed to address HA and DR challenges today’s SQL Server environments.

Continue reading at: Computer Technology Review

Tech Target: Mavis Tire goes SANLess with SIOS DataKeeper

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With DBAs rewarded for server performance and SAN specialists rewarded for server capacity, there can be a tug of war. Mavis Tire goes SANLess with SIOS DataKeeper. SIOS Technology releases a survey about high availability and SAN.

An IT department can become a battleground when different job functions are given competing goals. Performance and capacity are a set of competing goals that turn up again and again. These goals can pit SQL Server database administrators (DBAs) against storage area network (SAN) specialists. When pressure comes down from management and both start to scramble, they find they’ve been asked to achieve incompatible goals.

“SAN guys are measured by how much they can say they’ve saved with storage space,” said Geoff Hiten, principal SQL Server consultant for management and consulting firm Intellinet Corp. With SQL Server databases, space is money, and so the incentive is strong to push SAN specialists to optimize for greater capacity. According to Hiten, this means SAN specialists have to “micro-optimize for their areas.” That micro-optimization can reduce overall database performance.

In contrast, DBAs are judged based on the performance they can get out of a server. Since the DBA manages the server in its entirety, having the server optimized for something other than performance or a balance of performance and capacity becomes their responsibility. This leads to contention between the SAN specialist, who has been given the incentive to favor capacity over performance, while the DBA needs performance before capacity to do his job. But favoring capacity at the expense of performance becomes a problem for everyone, not just the DBA, when it slows down the server.

Continue Reading at: http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/feature/Mavis-Tire-goes-SANless-with-SIOS-DataKeeper

IT Business Edge: Hardware Failure: Time to Lighten Up a Little?

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Probably the single most hated word in the IT lexicon is “failure.” Hardware failure, application failure or (shudder) data center failure are enough to strike fear in even the most hardened enterprise tech.

View this article on: ITBusinessEdge.com

But like measles and Scarlet Fever, what once seemed terrifying tends to lose its capacity to frighten when new technologies are brought to bear. And as the age of virtual and software-defined architectures unfolds, it could very well turn out that what was once fatal will soon be, well, if not cured, then at least manageable.

Vantage Data Centers SVP of Operations Chris Yetman, for one, is calling for an end to the zero tolerance for failure that grips most IT shops. As he explained it to IT Trends & Analysis recently, focusing on improved recovery and failover will do more to help the bottom line than a zero failure policy ever will. Not only can you push the utilization rate higher, lowering both capital and operational costs, but the extent and duration of failure will be lessened. Failure is inevitable, so why not focus your energies on where they will do the most good: getting back on your feet again.

Part of this process will be to redefine your failure domains to reflect the changing nature of data architectures, says Plexxi’s Mike Bushong. For instance, SDN and bare metal switching offer radically different controller architectures, with SDN placing much greater responsibility for network functionality on a single controller. A proper failure domain, then, should cover issues like whether the control is or is not an active part of the data path and whether you prefer a single domain or several smaller ones to enhance management distribution. And for those running bare metal architectures (or both, as is likely for the time being), domains should properly reflect the convergence and resource pooling that is likely to take place as the enterprise consolidates its infrastructure.

All of this is the difference between simple backup and recovery and full business continuity, says Paul Cash, of UK consulting firm Fruition Partners. With continuity, the focus is on getting service back to normal, which calls for an integrated approach to B&R, systems failover, IT service management and a host of other functions. And the biggest impediment to effective continuity is bad planning, which in itself is usually caused by the set-it-and-forget-it mentality. Enterprise architectures and processes are changing at a rapid pace, so the worst thing for continuity is a plan based on system configurations that are one, five or even 10 years out of date.

Of course, another problem is the continued reliance on popular, but nonetheless complex and inefficient, architectures that make it difficult to swap out and reprovision failed resources. A case in point is the storage area network (SAN), says SIOS Technology’s Jerry Melnick. New SAN-less clustering approaches built on the virtual layer offer replication and failover across multiple hosts with little or no service interruption. The latest SAN-less solutions even offer this functionality across wide geographic areas, offering protection in the event of widespread disasters. And with local solid state storage solutions in the mix, enterprises also gain the benefit of improved application performance and dramatically lower storage costs.

New data paradigms are about more than just advancing technologies. They force changes on the way we build, manage and interact with the data ecosystem. Hardware failure in particular used to be the Code Red of the IT shop, but as functionality moves into the virtual and application layers, the health of a single piece of hardware, or even a collection of pieces, becomes less important.

Failure is still an issue to be dealt with, but if properly planned for, it no longer has to be a crisis.

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.

Boston.com: SIOS Sponsors “SQL PASS First Timers Session”

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SAN MATEO, CA — (Marketwired) — 08/13/14 — SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that it is sponsoring SQL PASS 1st Timers Webcast 2013 Edition presented by Microsoft MVP, Denny Cherry. This webinar is designed for first time attendees of the PASS Summit 2014 conference for SQL Server professionals. Denny will provide key insights on how to get the most value from the conference and he will share practical advice about attending key events in the November conference in Seattle.

The webinar will be held on Wednesday, August 20th, 2014 at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 6pm (1800) GMT.Register here: http://discover.us.sios.com/2014-08-webinar-denny-cherry-sql-pass-first-timers-session.html

“During this session I’ll be talking about the things you need to know if this is your first PASS Summit,” said Denny Cherry. “I’ll tell you where the must-see things are, and of course, I’ll be announcing this year’s SQL Karaoke party including sponsor, location and where to check in for PASS Summit 2014.”

Denny Cherry is the owner and principal consultant of Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting and has over a decade of experience working with platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, Hyper-V, vSphere and Enterprise Storage solutions. Denny’s areas of technical expertise include system architecture, performance tuning, security, replication and troubleshooting. Denny currently holds several of the Microsoft Certifications related to SQL Server for versions 2000 through 2008 including the Microsoft Certified Master as well as being a Microsoft MVP for several years. Denny has written several books and dozens of technical articles on SQL Server management and how SQL Server integrates with various other technologies.

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.