SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

by Leave a Comment

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeperHas this ever happened to you? You receive an alert about an application issue when you are out of the office, and you don’t have the information you need to address it? And you either need to access your cloud management console from an inconvenient location or pass the information on to another colleague to address? Or you are investigating an alert when another one comes in requiring your attention? Research has shown it can take the average person 23 minutes to recover from unexpected interruptions.

With companies moving to the cloud and having to manage more complex computing environments, this “alert stress” is starting to take a toll on workers’ productivity and mental health. Cloud monitoring solutions are trying to give you more information so you can resolve issues faster, but the depth of information they provide and the volume of alerts can be overwhelming.

Is Application Performance Management for AWS Enough?

Migrating to an AWS cloud infrastructure means that you often have to adopt new ways of managing and monitoring your applications. You can take advantage of AWS’s native cloud management functionality for your EC2 environment. But many companies quickly outgrow the functionality of these tools and deploy commercial Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for wider coverage and deeper insights.

But here’s the thing. These sophisticated APM solutions can be creating more work for you.  Yes, they often come with alert notification workflows to put the right information into the right person’s hands quickly.  But they do very little to fix the situation without manual intervention. The result: lots of stress-inducing alerts needing your immediate attention.

That’s why we created SIOS AppKeeper. It is the industry’s first out-of-the-box solution to automatically respond to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances. AppKeeper allows companies to protect applications from service interruptions and downtime while eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual intervention.

AppKeeper Automatically Restarts Failed Services in AWS EC2

SIOS AppKeeper not only identifies and sends notifications for failures. But it will also automatically attempt to restart failed services or reboot the instance if necessary. Our users have found that AppKeeper automatically addresses almost 85% of the application service failures that occur.  Without having to disrupt you, your I.T. or Development team or third-parties.

SIOS customers and partners in Japan have been using SIOS AppKeeper since 2017 to protect their AWS environments. ForgeVision is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, integrates AppKeeper into its cloud management console. It has been allowing it to monitor and recover customers’ failures more cost-effectively. And AppKeeper is allowing Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment.

We invite you to learn more about SIOS AppKeeper by watching this short video or by signing up to use AppKeeper for free until June 30th.

Then you can see for yourself what it’s like to have systems failures in AWS EC2 automatically addressed.

– Daisuke Yoshioka, Manager, Business Development for SIOS AppKeeper.

 

DataKeeper Cluster Edition for SQL Server High Availability In AWS Cloud

by Leave a Comment

The potential cost savings of moving to the cloud is nearly impossible not to consider. However, after you stop counting the money you are going to save, you start thinking about things like security and availability and wonder whether the cloud is for you. But fear not, we’ve got just the right solution – SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition.

In a traditional data center, you have the control and can deploy whatever security and high availability solution you like. However, once you decide to move your servers to the cloud your choices can become much more limited. It doesn’t matter whether you’re with Amazon, Google or Microsoft, outages in the cloud can and do occur and you need to do whatever you can to mitigate such risks.

Amazon Web Services

Let’s take a closer look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for instance. What are the options you have to ensure that your SQL Server database can survive an unexpected outage? While some applications can be deployed in a load balanced configuration across multiple availability zones, SQL Server is generally not deployed in a load balanced configuration. What this means is that SQL Server itself resides in a single availability zone and if that zone should become unavailable, your whole application stack can come to a grinding halt.

SQL Server 2008 R2 and its limitations

If you read this article by Miles Ward, you will see that with SQL Server 2008 R2, your availability options are pretty limited. In that article on page 11, there is a nice chart that lays out your HA options. As you will see, the options are severely limited and mostly fall outside of the category which would be described as HA. Log shipping, mirroring and transactional replication are pretty much the only options you have, and they are more of a data protection options rather than HA options. If you want Microsoft failover clustering, you will find yourself out of luck due to some network limitations (clients can’t connect to a clustered IP address) in AWS and the lack of a shared disk resource required for traditional SQL clusters.

AWS

If you are looking to deploy SQL Server 2012, your options get a little better. As described by Jeremy Peschka, with a little manual intervention you can deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups in AWS to do asynchronous replication from your data center to AWS, or even between AWS availability groups. Of course this assumes you have the SQL 2012 Enterprise license required for AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The only “issue” is that AWS really doesn’t support moving cluster IP address from one server to another, so client redirection has to be done manually using the ec2-unassign-private-ip-addresses and ec2-assign-private-ip-addresses commands after switchover that Peschka describes in his article. All-in-all this is a very manual process, which again does not really fit the description of a highly available system.

A Solution To The Limitations

If you can live without automated recovery and with the limitations of AlwaysOn Availability Groups that I described in a previous blog post, then you might just want to go ahead and try the AlwaysOn Availability Group deployment in AWS. However, if you are looking for an easier, more affordable, more robust HA solution, I have some really good news. SIOS Technology Corp has been looking at this problem and has developed a solution that overcomes all of the limitations previously described and will be available as an AMI for easy deployment. This solution is currently in private beta, but will be widely available later this year.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

The SIOS solution is based on SQL server in a Microsoft Failover Clustering using DataKeeper Cluster Edition host based replication. By using hosted based replication they have overcome the first obstacle of clustering in EC2 – lack of shared storage. The second obstacle that SIOS had to overcome was the issue of client redirection described by Peschka; the client access point needs to be manipulated from within EC2, not failover clustering. SIOS has built intelligence into their AMI solution such that the reassigning of the IP address is automated as part of the cluster failover process, effectively simulating the behavior you would normally expect from a cluster.

And because all of this is built on top of failover clustering, this can be deployed using SQL 2008/2008 R2 or 2012. Even the Standard Edition of SQL Server will support a 2-node cluster so the cost savings vs. deploying SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability groups could be substantial.

Let me know what you think. Does SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition sound interesting? What are you doing today to ensure the availability of your SQL Server EC2 instances?

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2013/01/11/sql-server-high-availability-in-aws-cloud/

Storage Newsletter: Enterprises Adopt SIOS Technology SANLess Clustering Software on AWS

by Leave a Comment

Like Gulliver International, Epicure Selections and Spirent Communications

SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, announced that enterprise companies are turning to its SANLess clustering software, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, to provide HA and DR of critical data on business critical applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments.

Some of these enterprises include Gulliver International CO, Ltd, a Tokyo-based pre-owned car company; Epicure Selections, Canada’s direct sales company; and Spirent Communications, a global leader in communications test and measurement.

“Business critical applications require HA protection, regardless of where they are deployed,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS. “In the cloud, you need to protect applications from downtime just as you do in a physical server environment. However, traditional solutions, such as shared-storage clusters may not be practical or even possible in the cloud. With SIOS SANLess clustering software, enterprises are able to use traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide HA and DR protection for SQL Server and other enterprise applications in the cloud without the limitations of shared storage.”

Most cloud providers enable a measure of disaster protection by allowing enterprises to use multiple separate and redundant data centers or computing resources. However, they do not offer shared storage (i.e., a SAN), which is required to support traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for HA. SANless software can be added to a WSFC to create a HA cluster without the need for shared storage. With it, companies can run their business critical applications, such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel Gateway, and others, in a cloud environment without sacrificing HA protection.

View the Entire Article at Storage Newsletter

IT Briefcase: Enterprises Adopt SIOS Technology SANLess Clustering Software on Amazon Web Services for Cloud HA and DR

by

SAN MATEO, CA – May 11, 2015 – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that leading enterprise companies are turning to its SANLess clustering software, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, to provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) of critical data on business critical applications in Amazon Web Services cloud environments.  Some of these enterprises include Gulliver International, a Tokyo-based pre-owned car company; Epicure Selections, Canada’s leading direct sales company; andSpirent, a global leader in communications test and measurement.

“Business critical applications require high availability protection, regardless of where they are deployed,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology.  “In the cloud, you need to protect applications from downtime just as you do in a physical server environment. However, traditional solutions, such as shared-storage clusters may not be practical or even possible in the cloud. With SIOS SANLess clustering software, enterprises are able to use traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for SQL Server and other enterprise applications in the cloud without the limitations of shared storage.”

Most cloud providers enable a measure of disaster protection by allowing enterprises to use multiple separate and redundant data centers or computing resources. However, they do not offer shared storage (i.e., a SAN), which is required to support traditional Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for high availability. SANless software can be added to a WSFC to create a high availability cluster without the need for shared storage. With it, companies can quickly and easily run their business critical applications, such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel Gateway, and others, in a cloud environment without sacrificing high availability protection.

View the Complete Article at ITBriefcase.com

DABCC: Enterprises Adopt SIOS Technology SANLess Clustering Software on Amazon Web Services for Cloud HA and DR

by

SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that leading enterprise companies are turning to its SANLess clustering software, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, to provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) of critical data on business critical applications in Amazon Web Services cloud environments.  Some of these enterprises include Gulliver International, a Tokyo-based pre-owned car company; Epicure Selections, Canada’s leading direct sales company; and Spirent, a global leader in communications test and measurement.

“Business critical applications require high availability protection, regardless of where they are deployed,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology.  “In the cloud, you need to protect applications from downtime just as you do in a physical server environment. However, traditional solutions, such as shared-storage clusters may not be practical or even possible in the cloud. With SIOS SANLess clustering software, enterprises are able to use traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for SQL Server and other enterprise applications in the cloud without the limitations of shared storage.”

Most cloud providers enable a measure of disaster protection by allowing enterprises to use multiple separate and redundant data centers or computing resources. However, they do not offer shared storage (i.e., a SAN), which is required to support traditional Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for high availability. SANless software can be added to a WSFC to create a high availability cluster without the need for shared storage. With it, companies can quickly and easily run their business critical applications, such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel Gateway, and others, in a cloud environment without sacrificing high availability protection.

Read the full article at DABCC.com