Success Stories | Page 5 of 8 | SIOS SANless clusters

Agentrics Uses SIOS As Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity Solution

May 13, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Global Provider Of Retail And Supply Chain Solutions Uses SIOS Protection Suite For Linux For Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity Solution

Agentrics is a provider of supply chain solutions for its roster of high-profile retail customers. The company faces tremendous pressure to maintain continuous application availability. If a failure prevented their customers from accessing its solutions, their customers’ schedules and planning would be affected. Thereby potentially resulting in a loss of time and money due to failure driven delays. Agentrics had a critical need for a disaster recovery and business continuity solution to maintain the security of its important data.

The Challenge

Before implementing the SIOS solution, Agentrics relied on the high availability (HA) clustering solution that accompanied its SUN servers for data protection. The company planned to move to a Linux platform. IT staff knew they needed an HA clustering solution. They wanted something that was both easy to deploy and comparable in protection to its previous SUN clustering solution. After conducting a thorough evaluation of HA options, Agentrics chose SIOS Protection Suite for Linux for its disaster recovery and business continuity solution .

Finding A Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity Solution

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provides continuous data availability by creating a fault resilient environment. It also incorporates application awareness capabilities that create, change, and manage availability. All these while protecting the company’s entire system stack through a single intuitive GUI. Furthermore, its application aware feature contains the ability to understand the interdependencies that occur between all system components. This is as compared to competitors whose same feature is limited to only monitoring the hardware, operating system and database.

Most Comprehensive And Scalable Solution

The SIOS solution’s advanced features make it the ideal choice for customers that are in the process of migrating their critical business applications and databases from proprietary UNIX to Linux systems. The solution’s unique makeup provides companies, such as Agentrics, many benefits. It includes the flexibility and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) savings that are associated with open source platforms. For Agentrics, SIOS Protection Suite for Linux was a key enabler. It reduced the TCO for the migrated systems by 40 percent. In addition, SIOS Protection Suite for Linux is recognized as the industry’s most comprehensive and scalable solution for eliminating application downtime from either planned or unplanned outages. Its disaster recovery and business continuity solution operates within the most stringent SLA uptime requirements. Ranging from local data replication and application failover to complete recovery from a remote site.

Benefits

For the past four years, Agentrics has relied on SIOS Protection Suite for Linux for disaster recovery and business continuity solution. During this time the company has not experienced any critical issues thanks to the solution’s unique clustering techniques. For the handful of issues that have surfaced since the solution was deployed in Agentrics’ environment, SPS for Linux was able to immediately detect them and take the appropriate pre-defined action. As a result, Agentrics has been able to maintain uptime in excess of its SLA agreements.

To find out how SIOS products, go here
To read more about disaster recovery and business continuity solution, go here

Enhance failover capabilities for disaster recovery with SIOS LifeKeeper

May 11, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

DICE Corporation Protects Integrated Security Solutions With Failover Capabilities For Disaster Recovery Using SIOS LifeKeeper For Linux®

DICE Corporation specializes in creating integrated solutions for the residential and commercial security industry.

Full Failover Capabilities For Clients

In addition to creating software that is installed at its clients’ locations, DICE also uses a complete standby facility to provide clients with full failover capabilities for disaster recovery. DICE mirrors file systems. If a failure occurs at a client site, the client’s mirrored system is automatically mounted on a standby system, without interrupting work on the remaining standby system. In all cases, assuring high availability is absolutely critical to the health of DICE’s business and its clients’ businesses as well.

The Partnership

After a thorough review of solutions in the marketplace, Hardware Support Manager Steve Senk and his team downloaded and tested LifeKeeper for Linux. Immediately, they saw its promise and began implementation.

“It has a nice visual GUI. A lot of similarities with the interface that we were accustomed to with our previous HA solution. Additionally, the pricing was very comparable. Overall, the package was very appealing,” noted Senk. The DICE team was able to migrate all of its applications and services to Linux with the assurance of high availability. This is all thanks to LifeKeeper for Linux and LifeKeeper Data Replication. Software application SIOS’ LifeKeeper for Linux ensures all applications, data and system connectivity is sustained. System uptime is maximized. LifeKeeper provides high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring system and application health, client connectivity. The software deliver uninterrupted data access regardless of where clients reside – on the corporate Internet, intranet or extranet. SIOS LifeKeeper data replication is an industry-proven solution on Windows and Linux. It provides dynamic, disk-level replication of data across local and wide area networks.

The Result

Since adding LifeKeeper support, hundreds of clients have signed on for DICE’s failover service, with over 50 installations in place within DICE’s facilities. DICE’s customers’ sites have required failover capabilities for disaster recovery or for other variety of reasons since LifeKeeper was implemented. Each time, the software has helped DICE support seamless availability. “The need for failovers has come as a result of a variety of situations. It could be a cleaning guy plugging something in and blowing a circuit, or a power surge from a storm,” said Senk. “Regardless of the cause, LifeKeeper is there for these problems. We’ve had nothing but success.” Looking ahead, DICE is planning to offer its clients a disaster recovery service leveraging LifeKeeper for Linux. Clients can use their own servers. Yet also replicate up to seven machines remotely, regardless of where in the world their servers are located.

To read more about this case study, go here.

To find out how you can also enjoy failover capabilities for disaster recovery on Linux, go here

High Availability Clustering Solution For Intelligent Building Control

May 9, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

High Availability Clustering Solution Protects Leading Intelligent Building Control Solution

SteelEye Technology partner, Open Minds, has developed a high availability edition of Tour Andover Controls’ Continuum intelligent building control solution using LifeKeeper technology.

High Availability For Intelligent Building Control Systems

Intelligent building control systems are widely employed to manage access to different parts of structures such as prisons, banks, hotels and large office buildings. These systems can also control the climate, constantly monitoring the environment. Also, it can control heating, cooling or dehumidifying different areas as necessary. The need for continuous building operation is at risk from power outages and natural events including lightning strikes or floods. As well as challenges like equipment failure, network interruptions or human intervention by accident or deliberate sabotage.

Real incidents of failures have, in the past, endangered security and safety. For example, hotel guests locked out of their rooms. Office workers trapped in lifts or high-rise buildings. But more worryingly, failure could conceivably cause systems to either lock prisoners into their cells during a fire, or allow them to escape.

Implementing High Availability Clustering Solution

With risk scenarios increasing and the tolerance for downtime decreasing, Tour Andover Controls looked into high availability to enhance its product offering. They did not have the expertise in-house to develop greater protection from downtime. However, Open Minds impressed Tour Andover Controls at a demonstration. Following a further pilot study, invested its own resources into developing a high availability edition of Continuum.

Open Minds achieved this by integrating SteelEye’s LifeKeeper High Availability Clustering Solution into the existing SQL Server-based control system. LifeKeeper constantly monitors Continuum and detects if the application or any of the system’s servers, storage or networks indicate error conditions. When LifeKeeper detects that failure either has or is about to occur, it instantly takes action to repair the condition. This avoided prolonged failure of the system and, therefore, preventing any security or safety risks.

Safe And Reliable Solution

The result is a LifeKeeper Protected version of Continuum that can be back-sold by Tour Andover Controls to existing customers, or sold as a separate price-list option to new customers. A typical solution comprises two servers, with or without shared storage. Where there is no shared storage, the package includes data replication over a dedicated link between the two servers.

In practice, Tour Andover Controls’ engineers have already come across instances where the building control system server has failed over between LifeKeeper-protected servers. And the customer has been unaware that this had happened.

Underlining the importance of High-Availability Clustering solution generally, there has also been discussion between Open Minds and Tour Andover Controls. They have plans to extend the solution to become an offsite disaster recovery solution. There were also talks about producing a high availability version of Tour Andover Controls’ Web Client using Internet Information Services (IIS).

Satisfied Customer Enjoys High Availability During Downtime

Paul Fileman, UK Marketing Manager of Tour Andover Controls, said: “There’s no ideal way for a building control system to fail. You can’t compromise security and safety, while systems are down or being fixed. People expect continuous access. The only viable solution is to have a building control system that doesn’t fail – and we do.”

Shobana Patel is the Managing Director of Open Minds High Availability Solutions. Patel performed the integration between LifeKeeper and Continuum. He said: “In today’s world, the cost of planned and unplanned downtime is under greater scrutiny than ever before. Thus, it clearly makes sense to build in protection of critical applications and servers. For this reason, we are finding an increased demand for turning many vertical applications into highly available applications. LifeKeeper Extender allows us to protect any application with surprisingly little effort. Continuum is a case in point where adding LifeKeeper to the solution truly enhanced and created a better product for Tour Andover Controls. It provided value added benefit to their customers.”

Guaranteed Support From SIOS

John Banfield, EMEA Director of SteelEye Technology says: “This is an initiative that we’ve been delighted to support. There are many standard applications with which LifeKeeper integrates straight off, and many others with which it integrates easily. There is an even greater opportunity for software developers to provide high availability solutions by integrating LifeKeeper Extender into applications while they’re in development. This saves engineering time later on, adds to the value they can offer to their customer. It may even open doors by being more likely in the first place to meet the real needs of business customers.”

To find out more about High-Availability Clustering Solution, go here.

Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution For Hedge Fund

May 6, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution For Leading International Macro Hedge Fund

netConsult Selects SteelEye LifeKeeper For Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution of Exchange, Oracle9i and SQL Server Trading Systems.

netConsult is a leading consulting and systems integration provider specializing in data security management for financial services firms. It has implemented SteelEye LifeKeeper to provide automated disaster recovery protection for one of its key clients, a leading international macro hedge fund based in London, England.

Complete, Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution

“Due to the real-time, high-value nature of our client’s business, any kind of failure in their mission critical systems prevents them from completing timely trades. It can have significant impact upon their business. Especially, in terms of the profitability of transactions and the confidence of their investment clients,” said Richard McDonald principal and founder of netConsult. “SteelEye LifeKeeper is one of four disaster recovery software solutions we researched on behalf of our client. The deciding factors in favor of LifeKeeper were that: it was the only truly complete, automated solution for disaster recovery. It was the only product that was capable of being demonstrated out of the box. And was by far the most reasonably priced given the complexity of our client’s environment, including the need to cluster a heterogeneous mix of storage and servers.”

Increased Server And Application Availability

“Coupled with overall heightened security concerns, it became imperative for our client to implement a comprehensive solution for business continuity. It should function reliably and efficiently. Regardless of the scale of interruption, from a simple server failure to a disaster requiring complete site recovery,” McDonald added. “We appreciated the assurance of disaster recovery protection. Additionally, our client has benefited greatly from the overall increase in server and application availability that the LifeKeeper clustering solution has made possible.”

Effectiveness & Stability Of LifeKeeper

LifeKeeper is being used to ensure complete disaster recovery protection of netConsult’s client’s core, business-critical trading systems. These include: Calypso a currency trading system based on Oracle 9i from Calypso Technology; Tradar Portfolio, also a currency trading system based on Microsoft SQL Server from Tradar Limited; and Microsoft Exchange Server, a messaging and collaboration platform being used for internal communication and confirmation of trading orders. The SteelEye LifeKeeper solution provides automated monitoring, failover and failback of these systems, coupled with integrated disk-level data replication between the customer’s primary business location in the heart of London, and its managed recovery site some distance outside of London, operated by Sungard Data Systems.

SteelEye LifeKeeper is installed on eight servers in a geographically dispersed, heterogeneous stretch-cluster configuration of four server pairs. All running the Windows 2000 operating system – four HP ProLiant BL20p G2 blade servers, accessing Hitachi Thunder 9500 V Series modular storage at the primary location. They are individually clustered over a wide-area network with four HP ProLiant DL380 G2 and DL380 G3 servers, accessing HP MSA1000 storage at the recovery site. Each of the server pairs provide individual high availability protection for the Calypso, Tradar and Exchange systems respectively. The fourth server pair ensures high availability of file and print services. The integrated, disk-level data replication capabilities within LifeKeeper enable the continuous synchronization of the server pairs. Thereby the creation of a stretch-cluster configuration to support disaster recovery over a wide area network.

Disaster Recovery Clustering of Exchange

McDonald went on to say “LifeKeeper proved to be a hands-off solution that was easy to implement in an environment known for its complexities. Since going live we have experienced several server outages. The incidents involved our client’s Oracle and SQL Server systems. LifeKeeper handled so well that no interruption or change in level of service was noticed by any users.”

In addition to the benefit of complete Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution, the LifeKeeper solution has proved to be very useful during systems maintenance. Previously, it was necessary to undertake the manual and time-consuming process of configuring and manually migrating users to backup systems. Now, with LifeKeeper, production systems and user connectivity can be automatically failed over to the recovery location while maintenance is applied to the primary server. Once this task is complete, systems and users are failed back in a similar automated fashion.

“The support we have received from the SteelEye technical team during and after implementation has been excellent,” McDonald concluded. “The deployment of disaster recovery solutions for environments like Exchange and Oracle is no simple task. SteelEye continues to demonstrate a broad range of experience and knowledge, which we value greatly.”

Ensure Business Continuity

“We are excited by the selection of our SteelEye LifeKeeper Disaster Recovery solution by netConsult. The latter is a very well-respected financial services IT consultancy,” said John Banfield, European sales director for SteelEye. “The ability of the LifeKeeper solution to address their client’s critical business requirements and technical complexity is a strong validation of our approach. It is solid proof that LifeKeeper delivers industrial-strength assurance of continuity in the most demanding of environments.”

To find out how our Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution can benefit you, go here.

Disaster Recovery, Data Replication For Cabot Square Capital

May 6, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Cabot Square Capital Ensures Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Data Replication with SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange

Leading provider of investment capital Cabot Square Capital implemented SteelEye Technology’s LifeKeeper for Exchange to provide disaster recovery, data replication. They wanted to protect its all-important Exchange server from damaging downtime.

The Problem

The company relies on Microsoft Exchange for its messaging and communication needs. Its IT administrators face the tasks of ensuring corporate resilience for critical applications and servers. It has to ensure business continuity, disaster recovery, data replication protection as well.

Enhancing Business Continuity

Cabot Square Capital were introduced to Open Minds, a distributor of LifeKeeper from SteelEye Technology. They were shown how SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange solution provided the disaster recovery, data replication protection needed.

Jay Derrett, Associate Director of IT of Cabot Square Capital, said: “As part of Cabot Square Capital’s ongoing reinforcement of its business procedures and infrastructure, our business continuity has been further enhanced in light of the heightened security threat to the UK. Our own strict criteria for full data replication and availability of IT have been addressed via the successful implementation of SteelEye’s LifeKeeper by Open Minds.”

LifeKeeper has plenty of advantages. It is proven to protect servers and applications. It uses the existing local area network and a ‘Hot Backup’ server, rather than requiring an expensive wide area connection to another site. This enabled Cabot Square Capital to put LifeKeeper through full testing before going to the expense of equipping a disaster recovery site and installing connectivity between the two. SteelEye’s LifeKeeper was able to consistently provide recovery in less than 5 minutes.

Implementation

Once testing was complete and the concept proven, Cabot Square Capital’s IT managers procured a suitable remote site and the necessary wide area connectivity.

Derrett commented: “Despite the complex technical nature of the infrastructure, this project was completed on time, on budget and on specification. We continually test and monitor the LifeKeeper solution. Till now, we have yet to find fault in it. This gives Cabot Square Capital a high degree of confidence in our business continuity plan.”

LifeKeeper for Exchange now gives the company the ability to mirror Exchange data between the Mayfair site and its new disaster recovery site located in London’s Docklands. Among the other features that impressed Cabot Square Capital is the capability to pause and restart the mirror, creating a backup window. This way, system maintenance and backups could be performed.

Reliable, Simple And Cost-Effective Solution To Meet Disaster Recovery Requirements

At Cabot Square, the whole business depends on a functioning email system. Downtime of the Exchange servers reduces productivity and costs money.

Derrett expanded: “We see protection of our Exchange servers with LifeKeeper as playing a key part in the development of resilience within the company’s infrastructure.”

“The level of service and general helpfulness of Open Minds and SteelEye influenced our decision. The assistance we received from SteelEye to resolve issues was beyond the normal call of duty.”

“Overall, LifeKeeper has fostered a sense of reliability that has enabled staff to be more at ease with the email systems.”

Shobana Patel, of Open Minds, said LifeKeeper is a reliable, simple and cost-effective solution to the disaster recovery requirements of today’s organisations. SteelEye went the extra mile to make sure the customer was happy.

John Banfield, EMEA Director, SteelEye Technology, Inc., said: “In today’s business environments, there is little room for errors. That includes losing communications with colleagues, markets, partners, suppliers or customers. When so much of that communication is done by email, it makes enormous sense to protect the email system. With LifeKeeper for Exchange, we enable companies to do exactly that in a cost-effective way.”

For more information about business continuity, disaster recovery, data replication, go here.