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

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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.

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Disaster Recovery Journal: SIOS DataKeeper SANLess Clustering Software is Now Microsoft Azure Certified and Available in the Azure Marketplace

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Award-winning software provides high availability and disaster protection for important applications in Azure

SAN MATEO, Calif.  – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that its SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is Microsoft Azure certified and now available in the Azure Marketplace. The new SIOS offering is the only Azure certified software that enables customers to create a SANLess high availability cluster in Azure using Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering.

By adding SIOS DataKeeper software to Windows Server Failover Clustering, customers can quickly and easily help protect business-critical Windows environments from downtime and data loss in a cloud or a combination of physical, virtual, or hybrid cloud environment. Now, for the first time, applications depending on SAN-based Windows server failover clusters for protection can be moved to Azure and achieve the more comprehensive high availability protection they need.

“We are pleased that Microsoft has chosen to certify and include SIOS DataKeeper in the Azure Marketplace. By providing fast, convenient access to SIOS DataKeeper software, our Azure Marketplace offering enables customers to deploy their important applications such as SQL, SAP, and Oracle in Azure with the same high availability protection they have in traditional physical server environments,” said Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology.

“Products like SIOS DataKeeper are pivotal in the cloud transformation,” said Vibhor Kapoor, Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure. “By providing the essential high availability protection for critical applications that enterprises need, SIOS and Azure are enabling customers to take their journey to the cloud with confidence.”

Along with its Azure Marketplace offering, SIOS provides an informative, step-by-step guide to creating a high availability failover cluster to protect SQL Server in Azure IaaS written by Microsoft MVP, David Bermingham. The SIOS DataKeeper offering in the Azure Marketplace is at:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/sios-datakeeper/sios-datakeeper-8-bring-your-own-license/

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.

View this article at DRJ.com

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.

Disaster Recovery Journal: Meeting the Protection Requirements of Business Critical Applications in Virtual Server, and Cloud Environments

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You can save money and gain tremendous IT agility, flexibility and efficiency in your data center by moving your applications to virtual server and cloud environments. However, there is significant confusion in enterprise IT management about how to meet the exacting availability requirements of business critical applications in these environments.

IT managers have a wide range of questions: Do you need high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protection in a public cloud? Are replication solutions sufficient? Can you provide high availability and disaster protection that doesn’t limit or offset the cost saving and flexibility benefits of virtualized environments? While HA and DR in a physical server environment is a straightforward matter of setting up a shared storage cluster, in virtual server and cloud environments, the best practices for HA and DR are not as clear.

Traditional HA and DR Protection

The traditional shared storage cluster is the preferred solution for achieving HA for business critical applications. When protecting applications based on SQL Server, IT staff often use Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to configure a cluster of two or more servers that share the same storage, usually via a SAN or NAS device. The application runs actively on one server and WSFC software monitors the server and application. If WSFC detects a failure, it orchestrates a recovery of all required application resources on another cluster node.

To achieve DR and protect applications from site failure today, IT typically uses a variety of replication or failover technologies and they require multiple products, scripts and manual steps to allow recovery at a remote site. Alternatively, more costly enterprise-grade SAN solutions are used to implement geo-clustering across geographically separate sites.

Challenges of Protecting Applications in Virtual Server and Cloud Environments

When moving to virtualization and cloud platforms, there are a number of application, database and hypervisor or cloud specific approaches to use for availability. Examples of database level solutions include SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AOAG). In the cloud, regional isolation of workloads is an option typically provided as an add-on service to use for assembling an HA/DR configuration. However, there are limitations in these solutions that make achieving cost-effective and reliable availability challenging.

For instance, AOAG is a SQL database-only protection solution and does not replicate the entire storage volume, which may contain other application data. It uses log-shipping and can add significant CPU overhead slowing performance.

In cloud environments, most providers offer separate computing resources for local or site redundancy. Providers also offer data replication services between zones but do not include any application monitoring or failover capabilities. You’ll need to use other technologies to fashion a complete solution to achieve HA or DR.

In contrast to these approaches, traditional shared storage clustering is a comprehensive, full stack HA solution that protects the application across the OS and all lower operating software and hardware layers. The problem is that traditional clusters require shared storage limiting their usefulness in virtualization and cloud environments.

For instance, you can use shared storage clustering in the guest VM, but to do so you have to use Raw Device Mapping (RDM), which adds complexity and limits the flexibility. In cloud environments, shared storage isn’t even an option.

So, if shared storage clustering is the best solution for tier-1 application availability, is there a way to provide availability and disaster protection using clustering without shared storage?

SANLess Clustering for HA and DR Business Critical Applications

A simple way to gain the advantages of clustering in virtual server and cloud environments without the limitations of shared storage is to add SANLess clustering software to a Windows Server Failover cluster. This software allows you to create an HA cluster without the need for shared storage. It uses efficient, block level host-based replication to synchronize local storage on each cluster node so that it appears to WSFC as shared storage. It can be used in virtual server (any hypervisor), cloud, hybrid cloud, and in physical server environments using high performance (SSD) storage.

In some environments, you can configure SANLess clusters in the guest VM and use VMDK storage, eliminating the need for RDM. SANLess clusters give you both full high availability protection for your applications and data and flexibility. Using SANLess clusters allows you to use low cost local storage or high performance server-side flash to cluster. This gives you complete VM portability, live migration, and failover protection with very high performance.

To take advantage of the cost savings, flexibility and efficiency benefits of virtual server and the cloud you need a sound strategy for protecting important application environments from downtime and data loss. While the redundancy offered in cloud and some virtual server environments provides some level of protection, it is not sufficient for business critical applications. SANLess clusters provide an easy, cost-efficient way to protect applications in these environments where traditional shared storage clusters may not be practical or even possible.

About the Author:

Melnick-JerryJerry Melnick is the chief operating officer of SIOS Technology Corp. Melnick (jmelnick@us.sios.com) is responsible for defining corporate strategy and operations at SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SIOS SAN and #SANLess cluster software. He has more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software industries. He holds a bachelor of science degree from Beloit College with graduate work in computer engineering and computer science at Boston University.

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Disaster Recovery Journal: SIOS Spotlights 5 Myths about Cloud HA and DR

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SAN MATEO, Calif. – Enterprises are moving more and more applications to the cloud. The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner, Inc. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

“While the benefits of the cloud may be clear for applications that can tolerate brief periods of downtime, for mission-critical applications, such as SQL Server, Oracle and SAP, companies need a strategy for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protection,” said Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and SANless clustering software. “While traditional SAN-based clusters are not possible in these environments, SANless clusters can provide an easy, cost-efficient alternative.”

According to Gartner, IT service failover automation provides end-to-end IT service startup, shutdown and failover operations for disaster recovery (DR) and continuous availability. It establishes ordering and dependency rules as well as IT service failover policies. The potential business impact of this emerging technology is high, reducing the amount of spare infrastructure that is needed to ensure DR and continuous availability, as well as helping ensure that recovery policies work when failures occur, thus improving business process uptimeii.

Jerry Melnick says separating the truths and myths of HA and DR in cloud deployments can dramatically reduce data center costs and risks. He debunks these five myths:

Myth #1 – Clouds are HA Environments. Public cloud deployments, particularly with leading cloud providers, are high availability environments where application downtime is negligible.

  • The Truth – Redundancy is not the same as HA.  Some cloud solutions offer some measure of data protection through redundancy. However, applications such as SQL Server and file servers still need additional configuration for automating and managing high availability and disaster recovery.
  • The Truth – You can provide high availability protection for Windows applications in a cloud simply by adding SANless cluster software as an ingredient and configuring a WSFC environment. The SANless software synchronizes local storage in the cloud through real-time, block level replication, providing applications with immediate access to current data in the event of a failover.

Myth #2 – Protecting business critical applications in a cloud with a cluster is impossible without shared storage.You cannot provide HA for Windows applications in a cloud using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to create a cluster because it requires a shared storage device, such a SAN. A SAN to support WSFC is not offered in public clouds, such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.

Myth #3 – Remote replication isn’t needed for DR. Applications and data are protected from disaster in the cloud without additional configuration. 

  • The Truth – Cloud providers experience downtime and regional disasters like any other large organization. While providing high availability within the cloud will protect data centers from normal hardware failures and other unexpected outages within an availability zone (Amazon) or fault domain (Azure), data centers still need to protect against regional disasters. The easiest solution is to configure a multisite (geographically separated) cluster within a cloud and extend it by adding an additional node(s) in an alternate datacenter or different geographic region.
  • The Truth: Companies can use the

Myth #4 – Using the cloud is “all or nothing.”

Myth #5 – HA in a cloud has to be costly and complicated.

  • The Truth: A cluster for high availability in a cloud can be easily created using SANless clustering software with an intuitive configuration interface that lets users create a standard WSFC in a cloud without specialized skills. SANless clustering software also eliminates the need to buy costly enterprise edition versions of Windows applications to get high availability and added disaster protection or as described in Myth 4, to eliminate the need to build out a remote recovery site.

iGartner Says Cloud Computing Will Become the Bulk of New IT Spend by 2016.(http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2613015)

iiGartner Hype Cycle for IT Service Continuity Management, 2014.  September 10, 2104.  Analysts:  John P Morency, Carl Claunch, Pushan Rinnen

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.