News and Events Archives - Page 2 of 77

SQL Saturday: High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SQL Server in Azure IaaS

August 23, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SQL Saturday: High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SQL Server in Azure IaaS

Speaker: Jason Aw

Duration: 60 minutes

Level: Beginner

Track: Enterprise Database Administration & Deployment

The CEO just tasked you with moving all the SQL Server instances to Azure, or maybe you are deploying a brand new application and want to leverage Azure IaaS to host SQL Server. Beyond security and performance, your most pressing concern might be ensuring SQL Server running in Azure is highly available.

While on-prem high availability and disaster recovery options for SQL Server are well defined, moving those instances to Azure immediately presents some questions and challenges. Can I simply lift and shift my SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance to the cloud? Do I need to upgrade to SQL Server Enterprise Edition and us Always On Availability Groups? What about shared storage and failover clustering? What about disaster recovery, what are my options there? Load Balancers, Fault Domains, Availability Zones, Azure Site Recovery and Region Pairs, what are these things and why do they matter to me?

High Availability and Disaster Recovery professional Jason Aw with 20 years of experience explains all this and more in detail.

For more details, please click here

SIOS Technology Earns AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Status to Help Management of Microsoft-based Applications on AWS

July 21, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS Technology Earns AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Status to Help Management of Microsoft-based Applications on AWS

Competency reaffirms SIOS’ deep domain expertise enabling customers to achieve Microsoft Workloads migration and management goals on AWS; Visit SIOS at AWS Global Summit in NYC

AWS Summit: SIOS Technology Corp. a company that provides IT Resilience through intelligent application availability, announced at AWS Global Summit in New York it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Workloads Competency status within the AWS Partner Network (APN). This designation recognizes that SIOS provides proven technology and deep expertise in helping customers in the migration, deployment and management of Microsoft-based applications on AWS, specifically with workloads based on Microsoft SQL Server.

Achieving the AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency differentiates SIOS as an AWS Partner Network member that provides specialized demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success with specific focus on tools to migrate workloads with minimum operational impact. To receive the designation, APN Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS.

“SIOS is proud to achieve AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency status for high availability solutions,” said Jerry Melnick, President and CEO, SIOS Technology. “This underscores our proven expertise deploying mission-critical Microsoft applications and workloads on AWS, by leveraging the agility, breadth of services, and pace of innovation that AWS provides.”

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify Consulting and Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

The SIOS Exhibit at AWS Global Summit in NYC

To simplify and accelerate the deployment of high availability clusters in the cloud, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is available on AWS Marketplace and can be deployed automatically using an AWS QuickStart. The AWS Quick Start deployment is ideal for organizations making their first venture into high availability clusters in the cloud. Today at AWS Global Summit in NYC, SIOS is showcasing how SIOS Datakeeper delivers the same high availability (HA) capabilities that are available through a Windows Server Failover Cluster in the cloud and configurable on AWS quickly and easily – saving months of effort, improving operational flexibility and drastically lowering costs to set up and maintain.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes software products that provide the insights and guidance that IT managers need to manage and protect business-critical applications in large, complex data centers. SIOS SAN and SANLess software is an essential part of any cluster solution that 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shruti Umathe

Shruti drives the News and Guest author program for Toolbox IT as she works closely with the rest of the Editorial and Research team. Being an engineer by qualification, she tends to explore the topics in the dynamic space of technology & digital transformation. She is a dog-lover and on weekends, you will usually find her whipping up a pencil sketch.

For any contributions please reach out to her at shruti_umathe@ziffdavis.com

Article reproduced from it.toolbox.com

New Amazon Web Services Competency For ISVs Migrating Microsoft Workloads

July 21, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

New AWS Competency For ISVs Migrating Microsoft Workloads

A new Amazon Web Services competency will validate independent software vendors’ skills and experience in migrating customers’ Microsoft workloads to AWS.

AWS technology partners can earn the AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency competency in three Microsoft workloads technology categories – migration, operational optimization, and data, analytics and machine learning (ML).

The new track complements the long-standing AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency track for AWS Partner Network (APN)consulting partners in productivity, database and application modernization.

AWS unveiled the new competency today in conjunction with its AWS Summit New York.

More than 57 percent of Windows workloads in the public cloud run on AWS – almost two times more than the closest cloud provider, Sandy Carter, vice president of AWS Windows and enterprise workloads, wrote in a blog post today, citing a 2017 statistic from research firm IDC.

Carter said customers often ask her why they should run their Windows workloads on AWS.

“I love to quote our CEO, Andy Jassy, who says, ‘There is no compression algorithm for experience,’” she said. “Customers have been running Windows workloads on Amazon Web Services for over a decade. From that experience, we are able to optimize our platform and innovate on behalf of customers. The number of AWS enterprise customers using Amazon EC2 for Windows Server has grown 5X since 2015.”

AWS has more than 14,000 active Windows Server and SQL Server partners, according to Carter.

To achieve the new competency, AWS technology partners must undergo a technical validation by AWS Solutions Architects. The competency debuted with 13 launch partners.

“It’s a great way for partners to differentiate, but it’s also in a high-demand area,” Kelly Hartman, AWS’ global head of the APN, told CRN. “And it’s the case where a lot of our partners, both technology and consulting, had that experience before, and now they’re able to convert that experience to AWS.”

Migration partners’ technologies provide pre-migration assessment and planning, or automate and manage the migration of Microsoft Workloads. Launch partners are Cloudamize, CloudChomp, CloudBasic, Information Builders, Movere, RiverMeadow Software and Turbonomic.

Partners earning the competency in the operational optimization category provide technologies that optimize and automate Microsoft Workloads on AWS in the areas of security, availability and manageability. CloudBasic, CloudCheckr, Datadog, FuseForward, Movere, SentryOne, SIOS Technology and Turbonomic already have earned the status.

CloudBasic, DataSunrise and Information Builders are the launch partners for the competency’s data, analytics and ML category, which validates independent software vendors whose technologies prepare, transform, analyze and govern data in Microsoft SQL Server for the purpose of data analytics and ML on AWS.

Article reproduced from www.crn.com

Video: The SIOS Clustering Advantage

June 24, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Video: The SIOS Clustering Advantage

Each year, your task is likely to provide higher levels of service using existing infrastructure and a smaller IT budget. Tolerance for downtime or data loss is gone. Applications have to be up 24/7 and you need to be protected whether that’s a server outage, a networking outage, application outage, or even entire data center loss. The expectation is that the amount of downtime and the amount of data loss converges on “0”.

IT professionals have more options than ever on how you’re going to support your end users whether that’s deployment of physical servers, virtual servers, or even cloud technologies. Choosing a solution comes down to understanding business objectives, technical requirements, and budget limitations as well as needing to understand how you’re going to protect the environment to ensure it is always available and you don’t have any downtime or any data loss.

This is typically done by implementing a traditional SAN based cluster involving two or more servers connected into some type of shared storage. If there is an issue, it will fail the application over and bring everything back online. SIOS software supports this and makes it easy to set up and manage. While a SAN based cluster is great for local high availability, the SAN generally represents high cost, complexity, potential failure in your clustering architecture, and it also doesn’t help you solve the disaster recovery problem.

SIOS software allows you to build out your cluster using your choice of hardware but now leveraging local storage. SIOS provides real-time block level data replication that’s fully cluster aware and integrated allowing you to leverage that very fast local storage with your cluster configuration. Also, adopting a SANLess cluster can reduce the overall cost of the solution by eliminating the SAN. As a result, you’ve not only eliminated the cost of the SAN hardware but also SAN infrastructure and administrative costs that come along with your SAN license savings. In addition, you will be cutting out that single point of failure in your clustering architecture so it won’t take down the entire environment. You can also eliminate data loss because our real-time block level data replication technology keeps the local storage in sync. Provided with the software there is also user friendly wizard-based user interfaces.

To sum things up, SIOS gives you the flexibility to protect your mission-critical applications and data in physical, virtual, or cloud environments. Learn more about our high availability solutions.

Learn how SIOS clustering software makes protecting applications easy.

Webinar: Availability Options and Requirements for SQL Server 2008 in Azure

May 25, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Availability Options and Requirements for SQL Server 2008 in Azure

Webinar: Availability Options and Requirements for SQL Server 2008 in Azure

Time is running out for your SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 instances. On July 9th the extended support date for SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 officially runs out. This means no more security updates will be issued. But wait, there is an option. By moving your SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 Instances to Azure, Microsoft will provide an additional three years of Extended Security Updates at no additional charge Running. Before taking the plunge on moving your SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 instances to Azure, you need to understand the availability options and requirements to ensure that your high availability and disaster recovery concerns are addressed.

Learn how to deploy SQL Server 2008 /2008 R2 Failover Cluster Instances in Azure properly. This includes addressing the lack of a shared storage option as well as networking requirements including the Internal Load Balancing requirements. Azure Site Recovery will be introduced as a viable alternative as a disaster recovery option which allows for a robust RPO/RTO in an entirely different Azure region.