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IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with SIOS Technology: SAN-based vs. Cloud Clusters

December 15, 2014 by <a href="/tag/it-briefcase/">IT Briefcase</a> Leave a Comment

In this interview,  Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology discusses the difference between SAN-based and Cloud data storage clusters, and the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.

SAN-based clusters have been the traditional way to protect critical applications and data. Is this still the case?
Traditional clusters based on shared storage (typically SAN) are no longer the de facto choice for providing high availability and disaster protection for business critical applications. Companies are finding new ways to combine physical, virtual, and cloud environments into new configurations to control costs and stay agile in today’s demanding marketplace. In these environments, traditional SAN-based clusters have significant drawbacks. SAN storage can be costly to buy and require specialized skills to manage. They also introduce the risks of a single point of failure. In addition, shared storage is not typically offered in public cloud environments. In these environments, SANLess clusters that provide the same level of protection without requiring shared storage are often a better option.

Can you create a cluster in the cloud?
Yes, in a Windows environment, you can use native Windows Server Failover Clustering to create a cluster in a cloud by simply adding SANLess clustering software. You can locate cluster nodes in geographically separated instances in public cloud environments for disaster protection. The software synchronizes local storage on source and target nodes in the cloud, making them appear to the WSFC as shared storage. If a failure occurs, WSFC moves the application operation to the remote node in the same way it does in a traditional shared storage cluster.

What technologies are available to reduce the financial burden of SAN administration and deliver the flexibility data centers need today?
SANLess clusters reduce the financial burden of traditional shared storage clusters in severael ways. They eliminate the significant hardware cost of SAN storage. They eliminate the labor cost of specialized SAN administration. \ SANLess clusters also support local SSD storage, enabling high performance and high availability for a fraction of the cost of a SAN-based cluster.

How can a SANLess cluster make providing disaster protection easier?
A SANLess cluster solution lets you implement disaster protection without the need for identical SAN hardware in both your primary and disaster recovery locations. You can replicate between any two environments physical, virtual, or cloud for disaster protection. For example, you can maintain a SAN or SANLess cluster at your primary data center and add a node in a public cloud for disaster recovery. This configuration not only saves the cost of SAN storage, but also the cost of building out a remote data center.

You can create SANLess clusters in a public cloud with nodes in separate geographic zones or even in two different public cloud provider environments, such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure for protection from local, regional, and even provider-wide outages.

Do traditional high availability clusters have an impact on application performance?
Because SAN-based clusters are typically optimized for capacity rather than performance, SANs can slow performance of highly transactional applications, such as SQL Server and Oracle databases. SAN performance can lag behind new, faster server CPUs, causing idle server time, slower application response times, and a potentially costly loss of productivity. Because SANLess environments access disk installed locally, there is no latency and no loss of performance in servers with even the fastest CPUs. As noted above, you can also use SANLess clusters with cost-efficient local high performance SSD storage.

Can you use a SANLess cluster in a virtual server environment?
Yes you can. In fact, SANLess clusters eliminate the limitations imposed when you use traditional shared storage based technology for clustering VM’s in a virtual environment. When using traditional shared storage clustering in virtual server environments, you need to use using Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) or Pass-through disks. This is a complex storage setup that limits desirable virtual machine functionality and mobility such as VMotion/Live Migration. In contrast, SANLess clustering supports all of the flexibility and agility offered in the virtual environment. It does this by allowing you to use virtual disks native to the hypervisor such as VMDK’s or VHDs thereby eliminating the need for RDM or Pass-through configurations.

What if I already have a SAN?
If you have already made the investment in SAN storage, you can continue to use it and protect your business critical applications with a SAN-based cluster. However, you may want to extend the cluster up into a cloud environment as a simple, cost-efficient way to protect your business critical applications from disasters without the need for a remote data center or disaster recovery site. Replicating from a cluster node connected to a SAN to another cluster node in the cloud can allow you to configure a multi-site WSFC failover between both environments with nodes in more than one geographic location for protection against local, regional and national disasters.

What is SIOS SAN and SANLess clustering software?
SIOS SAN and #SANLess clustering software provides the flexibility to build clusters your way to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment and in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. SIOS’ unique #SANLess clustering allow you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared-SAN storage.

Jmelnick 4x6 hi res IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with SIOS Technology: SANS based vs. Cloud Clusters

Jerry Melnick
COO, 
SIOS Technology Corp.

Jerry Melnick is responsible for defining corporate strategy and operations at SIOS Technology Corp. (http://www.us.sios.com), maker of SIOS SAN and #SANLess cluster software. He 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.

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: #SANLess, #SANLess Clusters for Linux Environments, #SANLess Clusters for SQL Server Environments, #SANLess Clusters for Windows Environments, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Cloud, Clusters Your Way, disaster recovery, HA, High Availability, IT Briefcase

Yahoo Finance: SIOS and Storage Switzerland Webinar Featuring Analyst George Crump Unveils HA and DR Must-Haves for High Availability and DR Protection in the Cloud

October 22, 2014 by <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/sios-storage-switzerland-webinar-featuring-130000403.html">Yahoo Finance</a> Leave a Comment

SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced a joint, live webinar featuring Storage Switzerland President and Founder George Crump and SIOS Technology Director of Field Engineering Tony Tomarchio. George and Tony will discuss the best practices for selecting a method of protecting Microsoft applications and data from downtime in an Amazon Web Services, Azure or other cloud environment.

The live webinar “HA and DR Must-Haves for High Availability and DR Protection in the Cloud” will be held on Wednesday, October 29, 2014 at 10:00a PST / 1:00p EST.

To register, please visit here: http://storageswiss.com/2014/10/07/ha-and-dr-must-haves/

In this webinar, attendees will learn:

  1. The advantages of a hybrid cloud or full cloud SQL Server environment
  2. The limitations of cloud environments when it comes to providing HA and DR3.
  3. The difficulty in implementing SQL Server in a “hybrid” fashion
  4. How to overcome these limitations to provide full HA and DR

George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland, has more than 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the U.S., he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one the nation’s largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.

At SIOS Technology, Tony Tomarchio is responsible for defining and delivering technical pre-sales services, support and best practices to SIOS customers, prospects and partners. Tony has more than a decade of experience providing systems management and high availability solutions to enterprise customers.

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.

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact

Winkowski Public Relations, LLC for SIOS
Beth Winkowski, 978-649-7189
bethwinkowski@US.SIOS.com

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: #SANLess, #SANLess Clusters for SQL Server Environments, #SANLess Clusters for Windows Environments, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Cloud, disaster recovery, HA, Press Release

SIOS Technology Spotlights 5 Myths about Cloud HA and DR

October 9, 2014 by sios2017

SAN MATEO, CA – October 7, 2014 – 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., 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.

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.

  • 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 #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.

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

  • The Truth: Companies can use the on-premise datacenter as its primary datacenter and cloud as the hot standby DR site. DR configurations can be assembled from a single on-premise server that includes a remote cluster member hosted in the cloud. Or, the on-premise configuration could be a traditional SAN based cluster that includes a remote cluster member hosted in a cloud. Both approaches are very cost effective alternatives to building out a separate DR site, or renting rack space in a business continuity facility.

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.

# # #

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact: Beth Winkowski Winkowski Public Relations, LLC for SIOS Phone: 978-649-7189 Email: bethwinkowski@us.sios.com

Filed Under: News and Events, Press Releases Tagged With: Cloud, cluster, disaster recovery, DR, HA, High Availability

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

October 8, 2014 by <a href="/tag/disaster-recovery-journal/">Disaster Recovery Journal</a> Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: Cloud, Disaster, Disaster Recovery Journal, DR, HA

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