SIOS SANless clusters

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Epicure Protects Business Critical SQL Server with Amazon EC2 and SIOS SANLess Clustering Software

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Epicure Protects Business Critical SQL Server with Amazon EC2 and SIOS SANLess Clustering Software

Epicure Protects Business Critical SQL Server with Amazon EC2 and SIOS SANLess Clustering Software

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition Software Provides High Availability and Disaster Protection.

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants. The company relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Their public website provides company and product information, recipes, blogs, and enrollment information to its customers and to people interested in becoming a consultant. Their internal website provides consultants with important information about products and enables them to place all of their orders. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, Senior Network Infrastructure Administrator at Epicure.

The Environment

Both of Epicure’s websites run on a single server using two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition—one for each website. As the company expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and to ensure both of its business-critical websites would continue to operate in the event of failures or disasters. They decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and to use Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud for disaster recovery. “By bringing the sites in-house, we could ensure that our websites would deliver excellent user experiences for both our customers and consultants as our business continues to grow,” said Born.

The Challenge

As part of this website update process, Epicure IT staff wanted an efficient, cost- effective way to provide high availability and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition.

“We didn’t want the added expense of moving to SQL Server Enterprise Edition if we could provide HA and DR with the more cost- effective Standard Edition,” Born said.

The Solution

Using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node SANLess cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the Epicure on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SIOS SANLess clusters and configured them using the software’s intuitive graphical user interface.

The Results

The SIOS software provided Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the cost and complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SAN storage or SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution that provides the cost savings of running on-premises and the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Because we know that if there is a website outage, it will failover automatically, our IT team can now focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

SIOS DataKeeper Clustering Software Enables Gulliver International to Move Internal IT Systems to Amazon Web Services Safely

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SIOS DataKeeper Clustering Software Enables Gulliver International to Move Internal IT Systems to Amazon Web Services Safely

SIOS DataKeeper Clustering Software Enables Gulliver International to Move Internal IT Systems to Amazon Web Services Safely

SIOS software provides high availability in AWS environments, enabling leading pre-owned vehicle company to move all IT system to the cloud.

Gulliver International is a leading pre-owned car company based in Tokyo with 420 locations throughout Japan. Over the next four years, the company plans to expand into a global business with 1600 stores worldwide. To ensure its IT infrastructure can accommodate this rapid growth, the company is migrating all of its internal systems to AWS and promoting a company-wide “cloud-first” policy for all new applications.

“Moving our systems to the cloud will give us flexibility and scalability we need to grow quickly and cost-efficiently, while continuously providing excellent service to our customers,” said Manabu Tsukishima, IT Manager, Gulliver International.

The Challenge

To ensure the success of their cloud-first initiative, Gulliver needed to protect their business critical applications from downtime in a cloud environment, where traditional failover clusters are not possible.

“We would not consider moving our applications to the cloud without an efficient, easy-to-implement high availability solution,” said Tsukishima. Gulliver chose to use SIOS DataKeeper software, which is sold in Japan by SIOS Technology, Inc.

The Solution

SIOS DataKeeper software enables Gulliver to use Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to build a failover cluster in a cloud environment, where traditional shared- storage clusters are not possible.

SIOS software uses efficient, real time replication to synchronize storage between servers operating as a WSFC cluster in an AWS environment.

Using SIOS software, Gulliver can configure two servers operating as a cluster across separate Amazon Availability Zones.

Just as in a traditional physical environment, if there is a failure on the primary server in the AWS cloud within one Availability Zone, WSFC moves the application to the second server located in another Amazon Availability Zone, providing full disaster tolerance and recovery in the cloud.

The Results

“We are extremely pleased with the value that SIOS DataKeeper software brings to our company’s cloud-first initiative,” said Tsukishima. With SIOS DataKeeper software, Gulliver can move to the cloud without adding complexity or disruption to existing operations.

“By enabling us to use a clustering configuration in the cloud in the same way we would in a physical environment, SIOS DataKeeper software made it possible for us to migrate to AWS without sacrificing application protection or changing the configuration of our existing system at all.”

About 30 percent of Gulliver’s existing on-premises systems have been migrated to AWS without any changes to the company’s system administration or added complexity.

As Gulliver continues to execute its expansion plan, it will soon need to protect even larger volumes of data and a wider range of applications. To meet thi s need, it will continue to use SIOS DataKeeper software as it migrates systems to the cloud. As a Standard Consulting Partner of APN (AWS Partner Network), SIOS is committed to continuing to provide high availability systems that operate on AWS.”

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Leading Beverage Manufacturer Protects Critical SAP ERP in AWS EC2 Cloud

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Leading Beverage Manufacturer Protects Critical SAP ERP in AWS EC2 Cloud

Leading Beverage Manufacturer Protects Critical SAP ERP in AWS EC2 Cloud

SIOS Chosen Based on Certifications and Validations for SAP, Amazon Web Services and Red Hat Linux

A leading Hong Kong-based beverage manufacturer produces 61 beverage brands including the number one software drink brand in the world and distributes them to more than 728 million customers throughout Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan and western USA.

The Environment

The company relies on an SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) system running in a Red Hat Linux environment to manage a variety of critical business operations. The SAP environment comprises a variety of services including the ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), SAP Central Services (ASCS), Evaluated Receipt Settlement, Web Dispatcher and the DB2 database. They used a large Storage Area Network (SAN) for data storage. The core SAP applications handle all business operations across the company’s beverage division. In their on-premises data center, the company provided uptime protection for this system using data replication and backups of the SAN.

The Challenge

The company’s IT department determined that they could achieve true high availability (99.99% uptime), disaster recovery, scalability and cost savings by migrating to the cloud and using failover clustering to protect their critical SAP system. However, they realized that SAN and other shared storage required for traditional failover clustering is not practical in some clouds and is not available in others.

The Evaluation

After extensive evaluation, the company chose to move their SAP environment to Amazon EC2. They established four key criteria for evaluating their choices for an HA/DR solution. Their solution needed to:

  • Be certified and validated for use with SAP, AWS and Red Hat
  • Provide both high availability and enable high performance
  • Protect against all likely failure scenarios
  • Enable easy ongoing operation and maintenance

The company’s cloud account manager recommended that they consider the SIOS Protection Suite, offered through AWS China. The SIOS software is certified by SAP for both NetWeaver and DB2, and that SIOS is fully tested and supported on Red Hat Enterprise and other distributions of Linux. The company tested the SIOS clustering software extensively under a variety of challenging failure scenarios, and also evaluated the throughput performance during periods of peak demand. The IT team’s confidence in SIOS Protection Suite increased as it passed each of their rigorous tests and proved to be remarkably easy to use.

The Solution

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux enables SANless failover clustering to provide full HA and DR for SAP and its critical services. The SIOS software uniquely includes modules called Application Recovery Kits (ARKs) that provide application-specific functionality that simplifies configuration and ensures failover orchestration maintains application best practices. The SAP and HANA ARKs automate configuration steps and validate configuration inputs and manage IP failover, and boot order to minimize human error. Unlike other clustering software that only validates server operability, the SIOS clustering software verifying that SAP and critical services are running, that databases are mounted and available, that any file shares or exports are available, and that clients are able to connect. To ensure these services are all functioning properly, SIOS software continuously monitors the servers, virtual machines, operating system and all major components of the SAP software. For DR protection, the company located the active and standby cluster nodes in different AWS Availability Zones for geographical separation.

The Results

SIOS Protection Suite has made it possible for this leading beverage manufacturer to meet the stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives established for its SAP/DB2 environment. To date, the configuration has experienced no perceptible downtime, including during planned maintenance. And these results have been realized with minimal effort, making it possible for the IT staff to focus more on projects that enhance employee productivity or otherwise improve business operations.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS