disaster recovery Archives - SIOS SANless clusters

Video: You Still Need A Backup & Disaster Recovery Strategy In The Cloud

November 26, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Video: You Still Need A Backup & Disaster Recovery Strategy In The Cloud

In this video, Dave Bermingham, Director of Customer Success at SIOS Technology, talks about high availability in the cloud and how companies can best prepare themselves for failures.

How do you define high availability in the cloud?

High availability and disaster recovery are key aspects of system management that aim to ensure services are not disrupted and data is not lost in the event of a problem.
HA is achieved through redundancy and failover mechanisms with services running on multiple instances in the cloud. DR typically involves backing up systems and data, with plans in place to restore systems from the backups in the case of a disaster.
While cloud providers do provide some tooling around high availability and disaster recovery, the onus ultimately falls on the customer to utilize these tools in their architecture.

Misconceptions about moving to cloud:

Many people moving to the cloud tend to think you do not need to do anything to ensure resiliency or backups. Yet they need to be able to keep their data in sync ensuring there is no data loss across multiple cloud zones. However, you still need a robust backup and disaster recovery strategy in case of major outages.
SIOS Technology can do real-time asynchronous replication between regions, giving customers a lower RPO.

What are the differences between HA/DR on-prem compared to in the cloud?

Cloud platforms provide native tools and services for HA and DR, which can make it easier to implement in the cloud compared to on-prem since all the tools, utilities, and infrastructure are already in place.
In the cloud, the cloud provider takes care of availability for things like hardware redundancy, network redundancy, and storage redundancy but the customer is responsible for everything else.
This is where SIOS LifeKeeper comes in, monitoring the application tier and enabling you to take recovery actions. SIOS DataKeeper uses synchronized block-level replication or asynchronized between regions, and even enables a hybrid-cloud model.

Challenges for HA/DR in the cloud:

Understanding and properly using all the high availability and disaster recovery tools is a key challenge. Each cloud vendor has its own unique set of tools and services, making it even more challenging in a multi-cloud environment.
Data sovereignty and compliance is another key consideration since some regions have specific laws on where your data can be stored and transferred.
Managing costs on an ongoing basis can be another challenge.

How does SIOS Technology help companies migrating to the cloud?

SIOS DataKeeper moves data to the cloud, doing real-time block level replication from one server to another, from on-prem to the cloud, or between instances in different availability zones in the same region or even between regions with our asynchronous replication.
SIOS helps manage the egress data cost by enabling data compression before the data leaves the region or availability zone achieving 3:1 or even 5:1 compression ratios.

Advice for customers:

Understanding your needs is key, since not every application or service may require the same level of availability. It is crucial to prioritize according to the business needs.
You need to assume that every component can fail and design the architecture so that any failures have a minimal impact on the overall service availability.
Utilize automation where possible as it can significantly reduce the risk of human error and increase the efficiency and speed up recovery time.
Make sure you are regularly testing to ensure your plan works as expected.

SIOS Technology Provides High Availability For Critical Applications in Airports

October 22, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS Technology Provides High Availability For Critical Applications in Airports

Failures of mission-critical systems in airports can quickly cause chaos and prove costly, which is why many airports look to implement effective failover solutions. SIOS Technology assists several large airports with high availability of critical applications and putting disaster recovery solutions in place.

In this video, Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales and Marketing at SIOS Technology, discusses high availability in airports, different critical applications airports run and the consequences should they fail. Hoagland goes into detail about how SIOS Technology helps protect these critical applications.

Key highlights of this video:

Hoagland talks about some of the misconceptions around high availability, such as when an application is put in the cloud, the cloud is providing infrastructure high availability not necessarily application-level high availability. She explains how this is where SIOS Technology comes in to bridge that gap.
Since airports run various service applications, whereby everything is deadline-driven and dependent on one another, this presents a number of challenges for high availability. Hoagland discusses the sorts of airport applications they protect, such as video surveillance monitoring systems and card swipers for access control.
Hoagland explains some of the different scenarios in which SIOS Technology assists customers with disaster recovery, saying that some put systems on-premises with a node or a disaster recovery site in the cloud or they run them in the cloud and have a disaster recovery location on-prem. She talks us through some of the main challenges their customers encounter and how their application recovery kits can help with failover.
Airports are continuously running critical applications, which need high availability. Hoagland talks about the chaos that occurs should these high availability applications fail and why even seemingly non-critical applications like baggage handling systems are in fact critical and can have significant knock-on effects with other applications.
Hoagland goes into detail about how SIOS Technology’s solutions help airports maintain high availability for their systems, telling us that the application or data is run on a server that is connected to a secondary server or multiple secondary ones. She discusses how their software detects potential failures and she explains the failover process in this scenario.
SIOS Technology’s solutions are being used by several large international airports for protecting baggage handling, card swipers for security, ticketing, and reservation, and arrival and departure boards. Hoagland talks about the negative consequences of downtime in any of these critical systems.
SIOS Technology works with any industry that has highly critical systems that are essential to the success of the business, such as manufacturing and healthcare.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Video: Why Your High Availability Environments Require Professional Help

October 13, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Video: Why Your High Availability Environments Require Professional Help

There is a huge uptick in demand for having central applications, software, databases, and data to be available at all times. Anytime these cannot be accessed, cannot be brought up, or cannot be connected to will cause severe loss of money and opportunities.

In this video, Customer Experience Software Engineer Matthew Pollard shares his insights on the importance of finding the right vendor to help deploy and maintain high availability (HA) environments.

Current trends in the market:

An HA environment is complex, with a lot of components to take into account: networks, operating systems, storage layer, the platform, server clusters, etc. There has been extra pressure on internal teams to remain hyper vigilant and responsive.
It has become important to have HA professional services vendors that you can refer to and get assistance from to set up and configure your environment.
Whether hiring a professional service is a one-time solution or part of your long-term high availability strategy depends on the maturity of the environment and the internal team. There’s always room for improvement, ways to expand that coverage into other parts of your organization, how to group things together and make your teams aware of high availability. Once the internal team becomes more knowledgeable, issues can be resolved quicker without the need for a vendor. Resolutions are incorporated into the documentation and runbooks.
During initial HA configuration, it’s very easy to miss small things between servers. What works beautifully on the first server may not necessarily work on the second once the first one fails.
After an HA deployment, everything on the node may be working fine, but something in the low-level layer of the central services could break that you might not know about, causing an issue when things try to move from one server to another.

Categories of external professional services available to help companies with HA environments:

There are services for configuring and installing your high availability solutions: making sure that your applications or your databases are configured correctly for the high availability solution to use them correctly.
There are services for standby resources or a standby engineer where if you run into an issue during maintenance or go-live where you’ve got a set window of time to have this completed in, there is someone standing by to help you.
There are services either for regular maintenance or for when you’re standing up even more high availability environments after that first one.
There are services for configuration, health checks, and validations, that you can run on your environments to make sure that everything was done right, you’re following best practices, you don’t have anything that might cause issues or even outages later on.
There are training engagements where your internal teams are trained by the solution provider so that they can more effectively administer and configure the solution itself.

The SIOS advantage:

It is a dedicated high availability provider, unlike other products where they may have optional HA components that you can configure or turn on.
It provides and maintains high availability environments for customers.
It offers well-defined packages of services, detailing each service along with the value that the customer is going to get out of it. This makes it easier to present to the customer’s management for buy-in.

Advice for companies looking to implement a high availability strategy:

Do that groundwork and be really thorough. Know your SLAs, requirements for your business and your end-customers, real-time operating system (RTOS), recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives for your data and availability. Make sure the vendor knows them too.
Establish clear communication protocols between all your internal teams and the vendor. Have someone who might be ready at any point to jump in and assist to help resolve an issue within the appropriate time frame.
Once you have high availability, be proactive with it. It’s something you still have to monitor, so that when the time comes for it to do its job, it can do so unimpeded.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Demo: SIOS LifeKeeper For SAP HANA

October 9, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Video Demo: SIOS LifeKeeper For SAP HANA

SIOS LifeKeeper provides out-of-the-box high availability protection for SAP HANA environments (on-premises or in the cloud) and ensures that cluster failover automatically adheres to SAP best practices for fast, reliable continued operations.

In this video, Todd Doane, Solutions Architect at SIOS Technology, demonstrates how SIOS LifeKeeper helps maintain high availability by performing automatic failover quickly and easily.

On SAP HANA:

SAP HANA environments are incredibly complex, especially when you want to do high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR).
There are different layers of the application stack: presentation layer, application layer where the ABAP SAP Central Services (ASCS) and the Enqueue Replication Server (ERS) reside, and the database layer.
You have to interpret and account for all of the SAP best practices.
There is a ton going on at any point in time that when there is a failure, automating the failover and meeting your recovery time and recovery point objectives are difficult.

High availability options for the SAP infrastructure:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Pacemaker integration)
SUSE High Availability Extension (Pacemaker integration)
SIOS LifeKeeper protection suite

Advantages of SIOS LIfeKeeper:

It is its own custom clustering software.
It is simple and easy to use. It has wizards to configure the chat environment.
It is SAP certified.
It handles data replication at the application level for ASCS and ERS volumes.
It handles database reregistration and can do manual or automatic switchback when a source comes back online.

Advice for companies looking to ensure business continuity:

Identify all the places that you could possibly have a failover, which could be environmental, human error, hardware failure, software failure, power failure, etc.
Plan for each single point of failure.
Train all the people responsible for supporting and keeping that SAP HANA environment up and running and available.
Test the failover scenarios. Ensure that when something fails and takes your data center out, you’re ready for it, i.e., your HA and DR systems will actually work the way you expect them to.

Let’s see SIOS Lifekeeper in action:

Doane shows two servers in AWS: one is running ASCS, the other is running ERS. He injects a kernel failure into the ASCS server. It goes down. The secondary server automatically takes over and starts running the ASCS process. When the server that failed comes back up, ERS is going to automatically move from the currently active server to the other one in order to maintain SAP best practices.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS