Webinar: Uninterrupted Transactions: Achieving High Availability for Financial Services on AWS

Webinar: Uninterrupted Transactions: Achieving High Availability for Financial Services on AWS

The financial services industry requires constant uptime and reliability to meet the demands of its customers. Even a few minutes of downtime can result in significant financial loss and reputational damage.

This webinar provides cost-efficient best practices to ensure that transactional, processing, and administrative financial systems in Windows environments remain protected and continue to operate through hardware failures, administrator errors, routine maintenance, and site-wide disasters.

Watch this webinar on-demand to learn about the tools and techniques available on AWS to achieve high availability and gain valuable insights on how to implement a robust and resilient infrastructure that can meet the demanding requirements of the financial services industry.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Webinar: Navigating Data Security, Availability, and Compliance in Retail: SQL Server Challenges

Webinar: Navigating Data Security, Availability, and Compliance in Retail: SQL Server Challenges

Ensuring High Availability for Essential Applications in a Multi-Cloud World

Ensuring High Availability for Essential Applications in a Multi-Cloud World

More and more organizations have deployed their mission-critical workloads across multiple public cloud providers. For distributed systems, such as databases and directory services, multi-cloud DR can be far more challenging. This paper discusses those unique challenges and how to address high availability and disaster recovery in multi-cloud environments.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

SIOS LifeKeeper HA for Milestone XProtect

SIOS LifeKeeper HA for Milestone XProtect

SIOS LifeKeeper for XProtect is a Milestone Verified Solution, offering compatibility with all versions of SQL Server, support for Workgroup environments, protection of key Milestone components, and flexibility in deployment. SIOS LifeKeeper empowers organizations to ensure uninterrupted operations, data integrity, and seamless access to their surveillance systems.

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Reproduced with permission from SIOS

MailHippo Protects Email Encryption Application on SQL Server with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

MailHippo Protects Email Encryption Application on SQL Server with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

“SIOS DataKeeper saved us from becoming non-operational.” – Chris Almond, CEO, MailHippo

Secure information transmission is essential to today’s healthcare providers. From accessing patient test results and medical images to sharing doctor’s notes and health records, quality healthcare requires the ability to manage and transmit health information securely and efficiently. However, many organizations face the challenges of doing so while complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires them to ensure confidentiality, integrity and security of any electronically stored, protected health information (known as “ePHI”). MailHippo (https://www.MailHippo.com) is an innovative company that enables healthcare providers to send and receive encrypted HIPAA-compliant emails and to collect medical data using HIPAA compliant Web forms. When MailHippo needed a way to protect their critical secure email platform from downtime and disasters, they turned to SIOS Technology.

The Environment

The company’s business-critical encrypted email platform runs on SQL Server 2016 instances in two geographically separated, on-premises data centers.

The Challenge: Cost-effective High Availability for SQL Server

MailHippo needed a robust high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solution to protect the SQL Server database that their mission-critical applications run on. “Our medical provider customers expect their HIPAA compliant email to be available 24/7,” said Chris Almond, CEO, MailHippo. “Their information is essential to their ability to provide vital health services to their patients.”

The company considered using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Always On Availability Groups to add HA protection. However, they did not want the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the shared storage required by this solution, which would also introduce the risk of a single point of failure. “We needed an affordable, reliable solution that would allow us to use SQL Server Standard Edition,” said Almond. They also wanted to leverage their two on-premises data centers running across different geographic regions to provide disaster recovery protection.

The Solution: SANless High Availability & Disaster Recovery

After rigorous research of HA/DR products, MailHippo decided to build a two-node cluster using SQL Server Standard Edition Always On Failover clustering in one data center and a third node in their second data center for disaster recovery. By simply adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to their WSFC, the company could replicate local storage on the primary cluster node synchronously to the second node and asynchronously to the third node.

With this cluster configuration, if a SQL Server failure on the primary cluster node is detected, operation is automatically moved to the secondary node and operation continues. Since DataKeeper synchronizes local storage on both primary and secondary nodes, operation can continue with an RPO of zero. In the event of a site-wide disaster, operation can be switched to the DR site.

“The tight integration with WSFC was one of the key reasons we chose SIOS,” said Almond. “We used WSFC to create the clusters for our SQL Server environment just like a traditional cluster, and we simply added SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition. This lets us use local storage without the need for a costly SAN.”

SIOS software uses performance-optimized host-based, block-level replication to synchronize local storage on the primary and standby nodes in the cluster, creating storage that appears to the WSFC as a SAN.

The Results: Fast & Reliable Failover

MailHippo has been using SIOS SANless clusters and achieving high availability and disaster protection. By using SANless clusters, MailHippo also eliminated the single point of failure risk of a shared storage cluster. “SIOS DataKeeper is a great fit for a rapidly growing company like ours. It’s easy to use, cost-efficient and most of all, reliable,” added Almond.

The SIOS system was put to the test in a recent downtime incident. “We lost our primary SQL Server when both power supplies failed,” said Almond. “But thanks to SIOS, we were able to get the platform back online quickly. Without DataKeeper, we would have required many hours and a mountain of manual work to recover everything. SIOS DataKeeper saved us from becoming non-operational.”

Reproduced with permission from SIOS