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Disaster Recovery Journal: SIOS SANLess Clustering Software Provides Epicure Selections with High Availability and Disaster Recovery Protection for Critical SQL Server Applications

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Epicure Selections deploys hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud

SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Epicure Selections is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to easily and cost-efficiently provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses.

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants.  Epicure relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.

The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition, one for each website running on a single server. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure.

As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. As part of this update, Epicure 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.

Using SIOS SANLess clustering software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the 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 SIOS software provides Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

“Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within an organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, you need to protect applications, like Windows SQL Server, from downtime if the cloud instance or the cloud provider fails,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology.  “Epicure is using SIOS to provide a fast, easy way to deploy applications in a high availability environment in the cloud while continuing to use Windows Server Failover Clustering.  I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own.An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.

Read more at the Disaster Recovery Journal.

Tech Target: SIOS SANLess cluster helps keep Epicure websites up and running

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Direct-sales food distributor Epicure deployed a new server cluster to keep its websites from being overwhelmed — and saved money on SQL Server and storage in the process.

Traffic on the two primary websites operated by Canadian direct-sales food distributor Epicure went up substantially at the end of each month — so much that the spikes often made the sites unusable. Epicure tried working with the third-party vendor that hosts the sites to resolve the problem, but saw no improvement. And the North Saanich, British Columbia company’s business model is dependent on the two sites. It uses one website to market itself and its selection of food and cookware products; the other site is used by the independent “consultants” who sell the Epicure products at tasting parties to place orders and communicate with the company.

Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure, looked for a way to keep the sites running smoothly through the end-of-month rush — and, while doing a Google search last year, he found SIOS Technology Corp. and its DataKeeper data replication software andSANLess clustering tools. The SIOS offerings enable users looking to guard against processing downtime to create Windows or Linux server clusters that utilize local storage only, avoiding the need to deploy a storage area network (SAN).

“Before that, I thought we required a SAN,” Born said. SIOS also supports SAN-based clusters, but Epicure would have faced some difficulties if [it] went that route,” he added. According to Born, a SAN leads to higher costs and more setup effort; it also creates a “single point of failure,” since the entire operation becomes dependent on it to function. To combat that, Born could have deployed multiple SANs, but he said doing so would have become prohibitively expensive.

No backup in case of outage

Epicure had another good reason to want to bolster its websites, which use SQL Server to process and fulfill orders and track the work of its consultants. Shortly before Born learned about SIOS, Epicure’s data center suffered an outage that lasted several hours. “We didn’t have redundant Web servers, so there was no failover externally,” he said.The company had two servers, one for each site, and both were reaching their resource limit, which contributed to the end-of-month performance problems. In addition to SIOS, Born turned to cloud computing vendorAmazon Web Services (AWS) to help relieve the pressure. The new setup for Epicure includes a primary Web server running on-premises and a cloud-based failover system, and the SIOS software replicating data between them. Concurrently, Epicure is upgrading from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012, and from Windows 2008 to Windows 2012.Jerry Melnick, COO of San Mateo, Calif.-based SIOS, said one of the primary motivators for the deployment was Epicure’s concerns about disaster protection and recovery. “There is so much depending on those sites,” he said. “Users are ordering off the sites. If they go down, it could take weeks to get [them] back up.”One method for ensuring high availability is to deploy servers in a second location so that, if the primary data center goes down, you can failover to the backup one. But Melnick said that has a high startup cost, so he recommended companies like Epicure tap into a cloud provider, such asAWS, for disaster recovery. SIOS’ job, according to Melnick, is to be the linchpin of the SANLess cluster.

More money left on Epicure’s table

Consolidating the two servers into one primary system also saved the company some money on the DataKeeper software. “SIOS’ licenses are based on the number of servers, so it was half the cost,” Born said.

Also, prior to working with SIOS, Epicure had been using SQL Server Enterprise Edition solely because that was the only way to get the high-availability features included in the database. Now that Epicure is using the SIOS software, Born said it has been able to downgrade to the much less-expensive SQL Server Standard Edition, achieving “very substantial cost savings” on that as well.

Born started out with some reservations about the SIOS technology. “I did have concerns initially that if SIOS lost its data connection, there would be some corruption,” he said. “But we didn’t see that.” In fact, he was able to work out all of the startup issues with the SQL Server version of DataKeeper while testing the product, and only needed to make a couple calls to SIOS support. “It migrated over seamlessly,” Born said, adding that so far, he’s pleased with what the SIOS software has done for Epicure’s websites and the SQL Server systems that power them.Jessica Sirkin is associate site editor of SearchSQLServer. Email her at jsirkin@techtarget.com and follow us on Twitter: @SearchSQLServer.

Read more on TechTarget.com

Storage Newsletter — Mavis Discount Tire Keeps Servers Rolling

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SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SAN and SANLess clustering software products, announced that Mavis Discount Tire is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to ensure HA for its mission-critical SQL Server applications.

Mavis Discount Tire

Mavis Discount Tire is a New York-based tire retailer with 150 stores throughout the northeastern US. The company relies on business critical applications running on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition to manage their orders, inventory, and other business-critical processes. For retail stores, application performance is a critical priority.

“Our retail stores need fast, reliable access to these applications to operate,” said Edward Schwartz, CIO, Mavis Discount Tire. “To keep customer satisfaction high, we cannot afford slow response times or downtime.”

The company needed a way to provide HA protection for its SQL Server applications and databases that would not impede performance. The company considered using traditional clustering using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). However, to implement a traditional cluster solution and maintain the high level of performance they needed, Mavis Discount Tire would have required multiple SANs and both dedicated and redundant external switches.

“While a traditional WSFC environment would have protected our applications from downtime, it requires SAN storage which adds cost, complexity, and performance overhead,” said Schwartz.

Since the company does not store large volumes of data, they saw little value in the storage benefits of deploying external SANs. They were also concerned about the performance impact that SAN storage could have had on the highly transactional SQL Server databases.

The Mavis Discount Tire IT department chose SIOS SANLess software to provide HA and DR protection without the need for a SAN.

“We used WSFC to create two node clusters for our SQL environments in the same way a traditional cluster is created,” said Schwartz. “We simply added SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to enable the cluster to use local storage in a SANLess configuration.”

The SIOS software uses performance optimized host-based replication to synchronize local storage on the primary and standby nodes in the cluster so that it appears to the WSFC as a SAN. SIOS #SANLess cluster software provides HA without slowing performance. They also eliminated the single point of failure risk of a shared storage cluster.

“The SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is a good technology for a company that is growing rapidly. It is easy to use and eliminates the need to buy unnecessary SAN hardware or redundant switches,” said Schwartz.

“SIOS is providing opportunities for the creation of SAN and SANLess clusters for physical, virtual and cloud environments,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology. “SIOS DataKeeper is a virtual SAN that runs under the application layer of SQL Server, allowing Mavis Tire to create SANLess clusters and benefit from all advantages of a second SAN without the performance challenges and added costs.”

Originally posted on StorageNewsletter.com on 12/19/2014.