SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring
Definition: Provides a structured approach for responding to unplanned incidents that threaten a company’s IT infrastructure. Disaster recovery protection typically involves ensuring redundancy and geographic separation of business-critical operations, data, and systems.
Reproduced from SIOS
Author Carey Nieuwhof hooked me with a blog topic of the biggest trap for 2021. While not directly speaking to HA, the topic alone made me reflect on some of the trends of 2020. Cloud innovations are numerous and begin at the most fundamental levels of the infrastructure. Not to mention advances in AI, machine learning, compute capacity and algorithms, memory management and sharing, and a battery of others. All of these advances add up to making the current generation cloud the most robust, reliable and available data center. These centers, optimized with redundant power, cooling, a legion of IoT devices for monitoring and alerting, redundant networking, high speed interconnects, massive servers, storage, and disks are impressive– and quite possibly the biggest trap that may be looming in 2021.
The biggest trap of 2021 will be believing that cloud availability alone is the same as or enough for higher availability. This is a complex trap to dissect. The list of named advances that make up the backbone of many data centers is indeed vast and impressive, and it is only a fraction of the technological innovations that exist driving the cloud. So, what makes this massively redundant, high capacity, and AI driven infrastructure a trap? Namely, that hardware and infrastructure availability still leave your enterprise at risk.
Disaster recovery grief can hit you out of nowhere if you haven’t implemented the right enterprise availability architecture. Meet our friend Dave in IT to walk us through the 5 stages of disaster grief.
Dave in IT: “Uh oh. What’s that alert? It’s just a little application crash, right? No big deal. I’ll have things up and running in no time.”
In the land of enterprise availability, there is no such thing as a little application crash or no big deal. Companies have SLA with real money on the line. Your selective reality is probably not the same perspective of your customers and stakeholders.
Dave in IT: “Are you kidding me. Of all the… [censored]...times, today the application won’t start. Ughh. I hate this[censored]...[censored]... application. Wait, what’s this new alert. Seriously, now, the datacenter is down!”
It gets messy really, really fast in the fast pace, and high stakes environments. When unchecked alerts and failures happen, problems can mount quickly along with pressure, frustration and anger.
Dave in IT: “Hey Ard in Applications, this is Dave in IT. Do you guys have any backups for the App1 environment? . . .Ard are you sure? Could you just check again? I know you’ve checked twice, but can you check one more time. I’ll buy drinks on Taco Tuesday!”
Dave in IT: “Hey Donna DBA, this is Dave in IT. Art in Applications said you might help me out. Did you by chance setup any database replication for that finance database or the inventory management system? . . . Are you sure? Umh, do you remember if we have any way to recover from a umh . . . datacenter crash?”
When my daughter gets in trouble, bargaining is her first go to. Okay, second. The first is to disappear, but you’re too smart to just walk away from the flames. But, Dave in IT isn’t the only one to realize that bargaining and begging is a poor substitute for a well defined strategy for high availability and disaster recovery. Skip the bargaining and begging about your disaster because “80% of the people don’t care, and 20% are glad it’s you (paraphrased from Les Brown).”
Dave in IT: “This is just great. The application server crashed, the datacenter is down, and backups, if I can find them and if I can load them, will take hours to get restored. There is no way I’m getting out of this… where did I put that updated resume.”
Of course you have backups, and you’ve validated them. But there is an RTO and RPO impact of going back to those backups. Are you able to absorb this time? That is of course, after your data center recovers.
Dave in IT: “It’s been two hours. I never knew we had this many Executive stakeholders before. No way I’m making it to my 2nd year anniversary after this. Well, I guess I’ll clean out my office tomorrow. No way I’m making it through this!”
Failures happen. Datacenters go down. Applications fail. There is no denying the possibility of losing a data center, having a server fail, or an application crash. This type of acceptance is normal, a part of improving your availability. Accepting that you may lose your job or worse because you failed to implement an availability strategy is something the experts at SIOS Technology Corp. want to make sure you avoid.
Don’t be like Dave in IT. Avoid the stages of disaster grief, and the hours of disaster recovery and downtime by architecting and implementing an enterprise availability architecture that includes the best of hybrid, on-premise, or cloud coupled with the best solution for monitoring, recovery, and system failover automation.
– Cassius Rhue, VP Customer Experience
Reproduced from SIOS
It’s the Hallmark movie season, I mean Christmas season, I mean Hallmark Christmas movie season… (don’t judge too harshly, I’m a father of six young ladies, a hopeless romantic, and married to an amazing spouse who enjoys a good holiday laugh and happy ending). If you are in the Hallmark movie season, you know that it is highly likely that you’ll hear the phrase, “Why is love so complicated?” It will be spoken just before the heartbroken young person has developed feelings for a new love interest, and is ready to dance the night away in their arms, just as the old flame walks into the party. If you aren’t into the Hallmark holiday romances, maybe it isn’t love that you are wondering about. Perhaps you want to know: “Why does high availability have to be so complex.
Cloud computing, edge computing, hyper converged, multi-cloud, containers, and machine learning are changing the landscape of enterprise availability at a blistering pace. By conservative estimates, AWS currently has over 175 services, and “provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world.” Choosing an HA solution that allows consistent management across all of these environments, with infrastructure and application awareness is an important way to reduce complexity.
Someone once said, “make your solution disaster proof, and the universe will build a better disaster.” Not only are we seeing innovations in the realm of technology, but also in the world of disasters. Resource starvation, cooling system disasters, natural disasters, power grid failures, and a host of new and random disasters often make it harder to insulate the entirety of your enterprise. Last year’s solutions will likely need updates to handle this year’s unprecedented outages. It’s important to work with a vendor that has focused on high availability for many years – who has firsthand experience with finding solutions to the randomness of disasters.
As technology moves head in the realm of virtualization and cloud computing, applications are following suite. As these application vendors add new options to take advantage of the cloud, they are also adding additional complexity. Your applications should be protected by solutions designed for higher availability and clustering in AWS, Azure, GCP or other environments. Look for vendors who provide greater application awareness, understanding of best practices, and who deliver availability solutions architected to taking account of how the application may have been architected and are able to optimize the application’s orchestration in the cloud.
The threats to your enterprise also impact your availability. Systems have always had to handle the attacks from intruders, hackers, and even the self-inflicted. These attacks have become more sophisticated, and the solutions and methods to avoid being victimized often impact the layout, architecture, and software that is deployed within your organization. This software has to “play nice” with your availability solution and your applications. As VP of Customer Experience for SIOS Technology, I have seen how an overly aggressive virus scanner can impact your application and your availability solution. Ensure you understand the impact of your security systems on your HA/DR environment and choose a HA solution that works with, not against your security goals.
Data breaches impact the architecture for your application, hypervisor and environment, but so too does the regulatory requirements. Businesses that have become global now have to make sure they are compliant with data handling regulations in multiple countries. This can impact what region your solutions can be deployed in, and how many zones you can use for redundancy. Additional, regulatory requirements can also impact the teams that can support your organization which may impact the choices for your availability software and support.
In the world of 24/7 searches, shopping, gaming, banking, and research the windows are shrinking. Queries must run faster and take less time. Responses have to be quicker and have better data. This means that the allowable downtime for your environment is shrinking faster than you previously imagined. It also means that maintenance windows are tighter, packed, and have to be optimized and highly coordinated. Work with an HA vendor that can provide guidance on optimizing your cluster configuration for both application performance and fast recovery time.
I grew up in a small town. The hardware store had one competitor. The grocery store had one competitor. The bookstore, antique shop, car dealership, rental office, and bank all had one competitor. Today, you have thousands upon thousands of competitors who want nothing more than to see your customers in their checkout carts. This competition impacts the complexity of your entire business. It weighs heavily on what can and cannot be done in maintenance windows, with upgrades, and at what speed you innovate. Environments that may have been refreshed once every five years have moved to the cloud where optimizations and advancements in processor speed and memory can be had in seconds or minutes. Systems that once had a single run book covering a simple list of applications now look closer to “War and Peace” and cover the growing number of processes, products, services and intelligence being added to increase profits while simultaneously working to reduce risks and downtime.
We all wish we had an unlimited budget, but the reality between what you have available is sometimes somewhere between a little and not enough. Teams are often forced to balance consumption versus fixed cost, license costs for applications on the standby clusters, and associated costs for availability software. Enterprise licenses often add a ‘tough to swallow’ price tag for a standby server in an availability environment. Architecting an availability solution is never free, even if you are a hard core ‘DIY’ team. DIY comes with additional costs in maintenance, management, source control, testing, deployment, version management and version control, patches, and patch management. While your team of experts may be clearly up for the challenge, your business likely would prefer their highly valued talents be applied to creating more revenue opportunities.
Growth of your business due to innovation means that your teams are now responsible for more critical applications, more sites, more offices, and more data that needs to be accessible and highly available. As your business grows and thrives the challenges that come with scaling up and scaling out add to the complexities mentioned previously, but also just expand what you have to prepare and plan for.
The complexity of the environments, speed of innovation, growth of your business, advances in the application tier, and growth in the competitive landscape brings with it the challenge of retaining top talent to keep your infrastructure running smoothly. Most companies understand that availability is a merger of people, process, product, and architecture among other things. So finding ways to reduce the complexity of clustering environments with automated configuration, documented run books, leveraging products with consistent HA strategies across the infrastructure is a key to both retaining the talent that installs and manages your infrastructure, and mitigating the risks and heavy lifting of those responsible for the key components of availability.
Let’s face it, love takes hard work, good communication, time, investment, skill and determination. There are no shortcuts to a successful relationship. The same can be said about achieving the best outcomes in an ever emerging, increasingly complex, and fluid technology space within your enterprise. Availability, clustering, disaster recovery and up time is so ‘gosh darn’ hard because it requires a serious, dedicated, non-stop top to bottom cultural shift accounting for the speed of innovation, the complexity of applications and orchestration, competition and growth, and the other components of keeping applications, databases, and critical infrastructure available to those who need them, when they need them.
-Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience
