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ALYN Hospital Ensures High Availability And Disaster Recovery Protection

March 7, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

ALYN Hospital Ensures High Availability And Disaster Recovery Protection For Its Critical Applications with SIOS DataKeeper

SIOS Chosen for its Cost-effectiveness and Application-agnostic Design

SAN MATEO, CA – March 5, 2019 – SIOS Technology Corp., the industry pioneer in providing intelligent application availability for critical workloads, today announced that ALYN Hospital is using SIOS DataKeeper software to provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for all of ALYN Hospital’s mission-critical applications. This includes electronic medical records, customer relationship management, SQL Server databases, Exchange and Office.

ALYN Hospital is acknowledged worldwide as a premier pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Israel. ALYN specializes in diagnosing and rehabilitating infants, children, and adolescents with physical disabilities, both congenital and acquired.

The IT Department at ALYN Hospital operates a variety of applications in a virtualized Microsoft Windows Server environment. “As a hospital, we are subject to some fairly strict government regulations, so we needed to implement strong business continuity provisions for many of our applications,” explained Uri Inbar, ALYN’s IT Director.

Hyper-V Replica, which is integral to Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, was an obvious choice for ALYN’s business continuity needs. The IT Department operates two, physically-separated server rooms on premises, which enables all critical virtual machines running on any Hyper-V host server to be replicated to another in the other room. “We were really struggling to satisfy our recovery point and recovery time objectives with this arrangement, so we started investigating other options,” Inbar recalled.

The Evaluation Criteria

To evaluate third-party failover clustering software, Inbar established three criteria: The solution had to work with existing hardware; it had to provide both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protections all of the hospital’s critical applications, and the total cost had to fit within the department’s limited budget. The IT staff quickly narrowed the third-party options to two, and after carefully evaluating both, found that only one met all of its criteria: DataKeeper from SIOS Technologies. “While we needed a solution that was cost-effective, we were determined not to sacrifice quality or capabilities,” Inbar emphasized. “With SIOS we found a solution that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership. For us, it was an obvious choice.”

The Results

SIOS DataKeeper is ideal for ALYN Hospital’s needs for high availability and disaster recovery protection. Because it is purpose-built to provide both HA and DR protections in a single, cost-effective solution. The ability to create 3-node SANless failover clusters with a single active and two standby instances has proven to be especially valuable for ALYN’s needs. “We are updating systems and software continuously, and with DataKeeper we can do that without any disruption to operations,” noted Inbar. Because the data replication supports multiple standbys and enables manual, dynamic assignment of the active and standby instances, the active instance can be moved to any server in a 3-node cluster and remain fully protected during periods of planned hardware and software maintenance.

Other SIOS DataKeeper features that are important to ALYN’s needs include the ability to work with any type of storage and WAN-optimized data replication. “The SIOS cluster seamlessly supports any storage volume recognized by Windows, and this substantially simplifies operations while enabling us to utilize all of our storage resources,” Inbar explained. Additionally, the WAN optimization will prove useful as Inbar and his team implement the remote disaster recovery site.

Inbar is confident the SIOS SANless failover cluster will perform as desired when needed: “We test the configuration regularly and routinely change the active and standby designations while redirecting the data replication as needed during planned software updates, and the applications have always continued to run uninterrupted. It just works and that’s very reassuring.”

“Whether your company’s critical applications are operating in a physical server environment, a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, they must be protected from downtime and data loss,” said Jerry Melnick, president and CEO, SIOS Technology. “ALYN is using SIOS to provide a fast, cost-effective high-availability solution for applications in a virtualized environment. 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 software products that provide insights and guidance that IT managers need to manage and protect business-critical applications in large, complex data centers. The company’s SIOS iQ is a machine learning analytics software that helps IT managers optimize performance, efficiency, reliability, and capacity utilization in virtualized environments. 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. Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (http://us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan.

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS iQ, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, SIOS PERC Dashboard, 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.

Media Contact:

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

To see how other companies have enjoyed similar high availability and disaster recovery protection, read our SIOS success stories

Read about how SIOS helped Alyn, go here

High Availability Cluster Solution For High Service Level

June 8, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Improve Ordering Process with High Availability Cluster Solution

The Japan Contact Lens Association has an online ordering system that takes in orders from dealers to manufacturers and agents all year round. SCSK Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as SCSK) manages this system. They added SCSK’s infrastructure cloud service “USiZE Shared Model” with an operating rate of 99.99%. At the same time, they included LifeKeeper to secure a high occupancy rate in the cloud and DataKeeper to build an operational infrastructure with High Availability Cluster Solution. With these softwares, the team could detected abnormalities not only on hardware and virtual machines, and applications. They have set up a system to quickly restore and continue services even in case of a crisis.

Contact Lens Ordering Platform That Provides 24 Hours 365 Days Service To The Cloud

The Japan Contact Lens Association supports the dissemination of contact lenses and the development of the industry. They operate a network system called “CLIOS (Contact Lens Information & Order System)”. “Web-CLIOS” is an ordering system that can easily place orders from web browsers anytime and anywhere.

High Availability Function To Monitor Applications To Minimize Business Impact In Case Of Failure

The USiZE shared model was supposed to be used as a new operational infrastructure of “Web-CLIOS”. It not only provides computing resources, but also provides system operation know-how acquired over 40 years and ITIL. The latter is a best practice in IT service management and a feature that provides high-quality service. However, even this is not perfect. “To realize the service level required by the Japan Contact Lens Association, we needed a mechanism to increase the availability of the application layer,” Mr. Ishihara said. The USiZE shared model is also equipped with high availability function. For example, if a failure occurs in the host server, you can easily move the virtual machine running on it to another healthy host server easily. It can be failed over. However, what can be monitored with the native virtualization infrastructure is only the state of the guest OS. It is impossible to detect failure of the application. Tesio Abe of senior engineer at SCSK cloud service department, explains, “Although the host server and guest OS appear to be operating normally, the application running on it seems to freeze or go down due to some reason. In the case of mission-critical services like “Web-CLIOS”, high availability functions that can monitor applications are essential.”

Short Failover Time With LifeKeeper and DataKeeper

In order to solve this problem, SCSK focused on cloud-ready High Availability Cluster Solution. After comparing and examining products of several vendors, they adopted LifeKeeper. Makoto Nagashima, SCSK Cloud Service Department Foundation Service Manager, said the High Availability Cluster Solution could maintain reliable operation for a long time.

Above all, it is also easy to install. High-speed data mirroring is performed by DataKeeper as a shared storage between the production node and the standby node. Even if abnormality occurs in the production node, LifeKeeper has a mechanism that can fail over in a shorter time which cannot be found with other products.

High Availability Brought About By “Protection Suite” Will Be Their Weapons For the Future

Although more than two years have already passed since the renewal of “Web-CLIOS”, the system infrastructure has continued to operate steadily without causing serious troubles.

SCSK says it will actively utilize “Protection Suite” in other services and projects. Ikeda said, “While high-speed availability of “mission critical “cloud migration is expected to accelerate, LifeKeeper and DataKeeper’s advanced availability for SCSK consulting /SI business and cloud services will become our weapon for the future.”

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped Japan Contact Lens Association achieve High Availability Cluster Solution, go here

Secure Availability And Performance With SANLess Cluster Solution

May 31, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Secure High Availability And Performance In The Operating Environment Using Local Disk

MT Eye achieved a SANLess Cluster solution with SIOS DataKeeper and Windows Server Failover Clustering

MT Eye provides a variety of content services that are closely related to daily lives, including “music.jp” and “Lunarna”. Shared storage is critical to support their operation. However, each site had different storage requirements. And as shared storage provides one setting only, problems quickly surfaced.

The company switched to an operation system based on the local disk of each site. Under this new environment, the company aimed to secure the same availability as a cluster solution that does not require shared storage.

Switch From Shared Storage To Using Local disk For SANLess Cluster Solution

MT Eye mainly engages in content distribution services that makes everyday life happy and convenient. Their products range from entertainment to lifestyle information and health care.

Shared storage has been positioned as the center of IT infrastructure that supports the operation of various services. By allocating the volumes required by each site from the shared storage, the company enjoyed a cost-effective and efficient operation.

However, issues from the operation system gradually arose over the years. MT Eye was forced to make a big decision as their operational shared storage no longer had any maintenance service. Hiroyuki Okawa of foundation system division explained that there is no guarantee that their current IT system would run well even if they purchased a new shared storage. Also, they were running a risk where they might incur high cost to operate certain sites. Hence, Mt. Eye stepped up to operate a local disk for each site. Unfortunately, this also did not prove to be smooth sailing. Even if it is a local disk, it is necessary to maintain the same availability level as shared storage, and performance level must be upheld.

WSFC and DataKeeper Combined With Always On Ensures High Availability

In search for a solution, MT Eye first focused on using the Always On availability group, one of the functions of Microsoft SQL Server. It mirrored databases among multiple sites mutually and automatically failover in case of trouble. In order to use the Always On availability group, it is necessary to upgrade Microsoft SQL Server from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition. To do this would result in a significant cost increase.

They found they could have a SANLess Cluster solution which used Windows Server standard failover clustering function and SIOS DataKeeper. Okawa emphasised that this way, they could continue to have Microsoft SQL Server as the Standard Edition. And yet at the same time, be assured of the same availability as the Always On availability group. It was also great to know that the cluster configuration that combines LifeKeeper and DataKeeper was already on another Linux system-based system.

Tomioka Tetsuhei of the Infrastructure Systems Department was still unsure. To ease his uncertainties, the company borrowed DataKeeper’s verification license from SIOS for testing. They assembled a cluster configuration close to the actual operation and repeated elaborate performance verification from February to March 2016. The performance deterioration was also seen when compared with the conventional system configuration using shared storage. He added that it was especially beneficial that they could pick between synchronous and asynchronous modes of replication depending on the system requirements.

Save On Data Center And Infrastructure Operation Cost

As of March 2017, MT Eye had already completed the transition to the SANLess Cluster solution for sites such as “Life Ranger Navi” (Life Information Service) and “Lunarna”. They were planning to finish the transition for the largest “music.jp” on the company’s website. With the completion, it was finally possible to provide storage resources corresponding to different requirements for each site such as performance emphasis and capacity emphasis.

If the company completely eliminated the use of shared storage, they could save on setting up a data centre. It also meant they could remove network equipment such as SAN switches from the rack together. In addition, the SANLess Clusters solution could also be migrated to major public cloud environments such as Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure. It could be said that the MT Eye infrastructure had acquired unprecedented agility and could respond to the demands of various sites.

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped MT Eye achieve SANless Cluster Solution, go here

Data Protection and Failover Clustering During Migration To Cloud

May 29, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Migrate Existing System Running SQL Server And WSFC Configuration To Cloud With SIOS For Data Protection and Failover Clustering

Gulliver is pursuing to migrate their existing on-premises systems to cloud. For this project, they picked SIOS Data keeper to ensure real-time replication, data protection and failover clustering.

The company aimed to build an IT infrastructure capable of responding swiftly and flexibly to the growth of these businesses. Protection of important data is essential as they shift to the cloud.

The system owned by Gulliver included the used car sale system “Dolphinet”. Most parts of this system has been built and operated on physical servers in their data center. Therefore, reform is definitely in their pipeline to achieve the expansion goal of 1,600 global stores.

Full Transition From On-Premise To Cloud

IT Team Tsukishima School said that for Gulliver, IT is the core of the business. Thus, having a strong and secure IT foundation would allow the company respond to rapid business expansion. Since 2011, the company has been contemplating a full-scale system migration to the AWS cloud service. Their entire operation can be controlled in the cloud which is easy and fast.

Challenges Faced in Migrating to the Cloud

Many of Gulliver’s systems are constructed with Microsoft products such as Windows Server, SQL Server of relational database, IIS (Internet Information Services) of Web server, .NET Framework of application development and execution environment.

The first challenge in transitioning to the cloud is the question of how to implement these platforms in AWS.

“We initially considered utilizing the SQL Server function supported by RDS (Relational Database Service), but we are also trying to use redundant (clustering) important systems and user management (Active Directory link) We did not have all the necessary functions yet. So, we considered other methods but the risks were too many many and too huge to undertake.”

Redundancy Plan To Ensure High Availability

So Gulliver chose to use the virtual server’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC 2) natively. The existing environment including the failover clustering (WSFC) function of Windows Server running on-premises is used directly. Therefore, DataKeeper played an important role in synchronizing the data of the existing environment as it is.

Achieve Real-Time Data Protection Without Using Shared Storage

DataKeeper performs data replication in real time between the production node and the standby node and protects data until just before the failure occurs. Compared to the general storage mirroring function, volume mirroring is realized at low cost. It can be utilized according to various needs such as the system configuration and the importance of data and the necessity of measures against disaster recovery (DR).

Simple HA Cluster Without Using Shared Storage On AWS

It is advantageous to be able to have HA cluster system (application protection configuration) without using external shared storage premised on failover clustering like WSFC. This is the point where Gulliver chose to adopt DataKeeper for Data Protection and Failover Clustering.

Gulliver’s Tsukishima said, “I was surprised that DataKeeper looks as if it is sharing storage from WSFC. The speed of mirroring is good. When an abnormality happens in HA cluster operation, I am extremely satisfied that it is easy to isolate and deal with. Whether it is on the clustering (WSFC) side or the data replication (DataKeeper) side, it becomes a quick and fuss free process. This point applies even when we are configuring the physical server. It became possible to shift to AWS without changing the operation form of the existing system at all. ”

Gulliver intends to move on to the rest of the existing system by 2014. At the same time, it is implementing the newly developed system in AWS.

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped Gulliver achieve data protection and failover clustering in their cloud migration go here

SIOS Data Replication And Disaster Recovery Solution For Data Protection

May 27, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Software Company Serving Educational Institutions Uses SIOS’ Cost-Effective Data Replication And Disaster Recovery Solution For Continuous Data Protection

The much anticipated Windows Server 2008 R2 became available in late October. VISUCATE became one of many small businesses to deploy Microsoft Hyper-V and enjoy its new features such as live migration. The company required a data replication and disaster recovery solution. One that was reasonably priced and delivered first-class protection.

In an effort to complete its set-up, VISUCATE wanted a business continuity platform that met its small business expectations. They took advantage of the high availability features of Windows Server Failover Clustering. However, 5fhbvd VISUCATE needed additional assurances that a loss of critical data or downtime would not compromise its software sales. To address these specific data replication hurdles, VISUCATE turned to SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition.

The Challenge

They required an affordable, uncomplicated and robust data replication and disaster recovery solution to protect its new Hyper-V set-up. To prevent any downtime, the company needed its servers to replicate and maintain their operational capabilities. If one server fails, the other server is configured to take over to sustain operations, maximize uptime and assure user productivity. The joint solution of Microsoft Hyper-V with Windows Server Failover Clustering and SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition addressed those business requirements essential for VISUCATE as well as any organization intent on overcoming this challenge.

VISUCATE Maintains Hyper-V Availability, Business Continuity with SIOS DataKeeper®

VISUCATE deployed Windows Server 2008 R2 on two physical servers with the Hyper-V role enabled. The company uses Windows Server Failover Clustering and SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to provide replication and failover of the virtual machines. With the Hyper-V deployment, VISUCATE’s five virtual machines were installed across both servers. Three in one server and two on the other server.

By keeping an operational Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machine synchronized between two physical servers, SIOS DataKeeper enables disaster recovery without the recovery and downtimes typically associated with traditional back-up and restore technology. Realtime continuous replication of active Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines ensures that in the event of any downtime impacting VISUCATE set-up, the replicated virtual machine can be automatically brought into service with minimal or no data loss. VISUCATE considered several options for a failover cluster solution. The company dismissed the option of creating a cluster with either a lowcost SAN or NAS/file server. If the SAN in that configuration crashed, the entire set-up would fail.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition reduces the cost of deploying clusters by eliminating the need for a SAN. It also increases the availability of virtual machines and applications by eliminating the single point of a failure that the SAN represents in a traditional shared storage cluster.

Benefits

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition allows companies such as VISUCATE to build “shared-nothing” and geographically dispersed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. By eliminating the requirement for shared storage, companies can protect against both planned and unplanned downtime for servers and storage. Also, the use of SIOS DataKeeper with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines allows for non-disruptive disaster recovery testing. By simply accessing the replicated virtual machine in the disaster recovery site, VISUCATE and other companies can segment a virtual network separate from the production network. Also, it would be able to start the replicated virtual machine for disaster recovery testing. An administrator can perform complete data replication and disaster recovery solution testing without impacting the production site.

In addition to support for Hyper-V clusters, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition enables multi-site clusters for all other Microsoft cluster resource types. This includes SQL Server, Exchange, File/Print and DHCP.

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped VISUCATE achieve data replication and disaster recovery solution, go here