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Mitsubishi Motors Moves Critical Systems to the Cloud with LifeKeeper for High Availability Protection

February 2, 2024 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Mitsubishi Motors Moves Critical Systems to the Cloud with LifeKeeper for High Availability Protection

When Mitsubishi Motors Corporation revamped its warehouse management system in three locations with new cloud-based systems they needed a new way to provide high availability without adding complexity or slowing performance.

“Even if a problem occurs, LifeKeeper automatically fails over from the primary server node to a secondary system in an instant, and operation continues without any noticeable delays for the users, saving IT time and eliminating service interruption for customers,”

said Hiromasa Tsuboshima, Manager, Business IT Department, Global IT Division, Mitsubishi Motors

The Environment

Each Mitsubishi Motors warehouse relies on a management system that handles orders and inventory for automobile parts and accessories sold by dealers, such as floor mats and roof racks. It manages the receipt of parts and supplies, shipment management for domestic and international orders from dealers, and inventory management and allocation within the warehouse location itself.

The legacy systems were run on aging, on-premises server hardware that were increasingly prone to problems that wasted IT time on troubleshooting and caused frequent interruption of operations. The existing systems used the hardware manufacturer’s proprietary redundancy to reduce downtime. If a problem arose with a legacy system, IT personnel would have to manually stop the system and switch operation to redundant hardware until the problem was fixed – a process requiring two to four hours of an IT person’s time.

Mitsubishi Motors must ensure that any parts or accessories ordered within a defined acceptance period are delivered to the dealerships the next day. Therefore, even short periods of downtime for these mission-critical systems could have a significant impact on the business.

The warehouse management system plays a critical role in ensuring that all orders are processed in time to meet delivery schedules. For example, to ensure next day delivery of an order entered at 4:29 PM, the warehouse management system has to process and display it by 4:40 PM so that it can be put on the last truck or flight of the day. “We need to recover in less than 10 minutes,” said Iwasaki.

The Challenge

Hiromasa Tsuboshima, Manager of the Business IT Department, Global IT Division, Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, said, “Our existing systems at three of our six warehouses were on hardware from 2012. We needed to replace them with new systems that would eliminate the drain on IT resources and reduce negative impact on operations.” Finding a high availability solution for their new cloud-based warehouse systems was critical to the success of the project. Satoshi Iwasaki, member of the Business IT Department in the Global IT Division at Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, said, “According to company-wide policy, we need to migrate from legacy on-premises systems to the public cloud whenever we build a new system.”

High Availability Software

When migrating the warehouse management systems to a public cloud, Mitsubishi Motor’s consulted an outside IT consultant who recommended SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux for high availability. “In our past experience, we always used hardware solutions for high availability,” said Mr. Iwasaki. “I had a lot of in-depth questions for the SIOS representative about using software for HA, and SIOS provided accurate, complete answers, which built my trust in SIOS LifeKeeper.”

Another key factor in deciding to select LifeKeeper was the optional LifeKeeper Professional Service, which provides an application-aware recovery kit (ARK) tailored to Mitsubishi’s specific warehouse system requirements.

The SIOS ARKs enable LifeKeeper to monitor the entire application stack for potential downtime issues. They also orchestrate the application failover in accordance with best practices for smooth operation on the secondary node. “We were able to customize and develop LifeKeeper to meet our requirements, and SIOS was able to respond to all of our requests,” said Mr. Iwasaki.

Fast, Automatic Failover

“Even if a problem occurs, LifeKeeper automatically fails over from the primary server node to a secondary node in an instant, and operation continues without any noticeable delays for the users. It saves IT time and eliminates service interruption for customers,” said Mr. Tsuboshima. Mr. Tsuboshima is in charge of overseeing some of the systems in Global IT Division. Before the upgrade project, he used to receive failure alerts at all hours of the night that required his immediate attention. Today, in the event of a failure, he simply receives a notification of the failover and the systems continue to operate without intervention. The SIOS solution has saved Mr. Tsuboshima and the rest of the IT team many hours of valuable time and eliminated disruptions to service.

The Results

The benefits of moving the warehouse management system to the cloud while ensuring high availability with LifeKeeper were evident in response to the 2020 pandemic. ‘Having our systems in the cloud, enabled us to manage the systems remotely. “If we had stayed on the old, on-premises system, we would have faced significant added risk of coming into the office during the COVID-19 emergency to fix issues or manage the systems,” said Mr. Iwasaki.

Although Mitsubishi Motors continues to shift to the public cloud, many of its systems still use mainframes. “As we consider moving our mission-critical systems, away from these host systems and into the cloud, we will look to LifeKeeper for high availability protection,” said Mr. Iwasaki. We will be recommending it to the company in the future.”

Learn more about SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux

Learn more about SIOS Protection Suite including SIOS LifeKeeper, SIOS DataKeeper, and SIOS application recovery kits.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

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

January 10, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

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

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

October 25, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

While researching reasons to migrate to the cloud, you’ve probably learned that the benefits of cloud computing include scalability, reliability, availability, and more. But what, exactly, do those terms mean? Let’s consider high availability (HA), as it is often the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud for many companies.

The idea is to make your products, services, and tools accessible to your customers and employees at any time from anywhere using any device with an internet connection. That means ensuring your critical applications are operational – even through hardware failures, software issues, human errors, and sitewide disasters – at least 99.99% of the time (that’s the definition of high availability).

While public cloud providers typically guarantee some level of availability in their service level agreements, those SLAs only apply to the cloud hardware. There are many reasons for application downtime that aren’t covered by SLAs. For this reason, you need to protect these applications with clustering software that will detect issues and reliably move operations to a standby server if necessary. As you plan what and how you will make solutions available in the cloud, remember that it is important that your products and services and cloud infrastructure are scalable, reliable, and available when and where they are needed.

Quick Stats on High Availability in the Cloud in 2021

Now that we’ve defined availability in the cloud context, let’s look at its impact on organizations and businesses. PSA, these statistics may shock you, but don’t fret. We’ve also got some solutions to these pressing and costly issues.

As much as 80% of Enterprise IT will move to the cloud by 2025 (Oracle).
The average cost of IT downtime is between $5,600 and $11,600 per minute (Gartner; Comparitech).
Average IT staffing to employee ratio is 1:27 (Ecityworks).
22% of downtime is the result of human error (Cloudscene).
In 2020, 54% of enterprises’ cloud-based applications moved from an on-premises environment to the cloud, while 46% were purpose-built for the cloud (Forbes).
1 in 5 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan (HBJ).
70% of companies have suffered a public cloud data breach in the past year (HIPAA).
48% of businesses store classified information on the cloud (Panda Security).
96% of businesses experienced an outage in a 3-year period (Comparitech).
45% of companies reported downtime from hardware failure (PhoenixNAP).

What You Can Do – Stay Informed

If you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, join us. The SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium is taking place Wednesday, September 22nd (EMEA) and Thursday, September 23rd (US) in a global virtual conference format for IT professionals focusing on the availability needs of the enterprise IT customer. This event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Cloud Symposium Speakers & Sessions Posted

We have selected speakers presenting a wide range of sessions supporting availability for multiple areas of the data application stack. Check out the sessions posted and check back for additional presentations to be announced! Learn more

Register Now

Whether you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, this event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Reproduced from SIOS

Do I Even Need High Availability software in the Cloud?

January 23, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Do I Even Need High Availability software in the Cloud?

Allow me to jog your memory . . .

Maybe today you haven’t had a failure in a dozen or more months and suddenly the slam dunk renewal for your high availability software licenses is under the redline of the CFO’s pen. Or perhaps, due in part to the overuse of the term, clever marketing, or the redefinition of high availability your CIO, once the most die-hard availability fan, has begun to waver on its value. Or maybe, just maybe it’s not the CFO or the CIO, but you who decided that you might have enough HA without needing high or higher availability software in the equation.

While the public cloud is incredibly resilient and availability has been considered at many turns, the need for stable, maintainable high availability software is still a present reality. Consider 2020 for example, advances in public cloud computing and availability have still been unable to prevent common mishaps such as bad practice and bad code causing an application crash, undisclosed data center failures, nameless construction snafus affecting power or networking, capacity overload on a VM, or cooling system failures as noted by one CRN article.

Here are seven reasons you still need higher availability software in the Cloud:

1. For increased depth and breadth of application coverage for your most critical enterprise applications

No single Cloud vendor will have all the tools, software, and applications you need baked into their cloud infrastructure in a way that your enterprise can consume. Because of this, you will likely migrate workloads to the cloud into IaaS offerings that require someone or something to protect these workloads and make sure they are highly available.

2. For automated and intelligent application recovery of systems, resources and their dependencies.

Cloud vendors know about clouds. High availability vendors know about application high availability. When, not if, a failure happens in the cloud your application needs intelligent recovery of the failed components; systems, application resources, infrastructure components and their dependencies. As an expert in availability, your software vendor has a breadth of knowledge baked into the application protection. In the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux product, wizard based automation using industry best practices, and a long history of application expertise drive clear automated recovery of applications in a failure scenario

3. For intelligent block level data replication for your application, increasing your resilience in the event of a system panic or datacenter outage

Application coverage and smart, balanced recovery is made possible when the data is available on the standby system in the event of a failure. When your HA vendor includes block level data replication, you are able to expand the failover resilience of your application beyond a single datacenter or region into multiple datacenters and regions. Block level data replication is also an effective way to avoid hardware values that impact cloud volumes in a single data center. One cloud incident involving a datacenter power and subsequent generator failure resulted in hardware damage and data loss for instances running in the single data center. Cloud does not mean that you are completely safe from all failures, and backups as well as highly available data replication copies is a must.

4. For a faster response mechanism for problem detection and resolution

Your HA software is the first line of defense for identifying and remediating application failures. With monitoring daemons, an application failure can be quickly detected and remediated by the software before users are critically impacted. In addition, your high availability software such as the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux solution includes configurable methods for sending and communicating alerts to administrators, event consoles, or dashboards which allows you to instantly and effectively communicate with key .

5. For an additional source of data that can be mined and audited to help predict the health and stability of your enterprise

Data is king. Your high availability software is a tremendous source of data and information about your environment that can be mined and audited. As your HA solution responds to application failures, infrastructure issues and latencies, and drives your uptime through transient failures their logs capture critical information on the health of your enterprise. As VP of Customer Experience, our Customer Success and Support team was able to use our HA logs to provide a health check up to a customer, informing them of several application issues and optimizations possible because of the captured log data.

6. For the balanced and truthful viewpoint, and supplemental wisdom needed for your enterprise

In addition to the value of the High Availability software, there is another reason why you still need HA software in the cloud. That additional reason is the balanced and truthful viewpoint and supplemental wisdom of your HA vendor’s development, services and customer experience teams. Your HA software is supported by a team of experts, experienced availability engineers, and most importantly a services and support team with years of best practice experience, application specific knowledge, and cross pollinated ideas and skills that can greatly benefit your enterprise.

7. For reduced planned maintenance downtime

Last but not least, your higher availability software helps reduce or possibly eliminate the downtime required for upgrades, minor patches, and rolling preventative maintenance. Utilizing your HA software’s switchover and failover capabilities, your standby server can be actively patched, updated, and tested then promoted to being the active availability node. Thereby ensuring that your critical systems are running on the latest releases while minimizing the penalty of upgrades.

Yes, the Cloud has added increased hardware and platform stability for applications, developers, and enterprise users, but if you’ve begun thinking that you don’t need high availability you are heading down a dark alley that ends in the despair of a late night of cold pizza putting applications back online, explaining the unexplainable, and contemplating dusting off resumes. So thanks for letting me jog your memory . . . You and your HA software need each other, even in the Cloud.

– Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience

Reproduced with permission from SIOS