high availability protection | SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition Delivers High Availability Protection, Configuration Flexibility, Bandwidth Efficiency

A leading healthcare information services provider serves more than 10,000 healthcare organizations across the United States. They rely on their SQL Server databases to deliver a wide range of services. This includes revenue management, patient self-service, and patient care management systems.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition eliminated bandwidth issues, improved data protection, and significantly reduced downtime in a critical healthcare network environment.

The Environment

The company has more than 20 SQL Server clusters located in two geographically separated data centers for primary data support and disaster recovery. They also have smaller servers in their network, as well as SQL Server log shipping for disaster recovery. Because of this vast customer base and IT infrastructure, the company needed a secure, reliable High Availability Protection solution. Something that could efficiently handle heavy network traffic, limit the amount of data at risk, and reduce downtime.

The Challenge

Replication to the company’s disaster recovery site flooded bandwidth, which reduced reliability across the entire network. A reliable network is critical for maintaining and processing patient and billing data for the company’s hospital and healthcare provider clients. The company also needed a reliable, efficient High Availability Protection to improve their recovery point objective (RPO). This means that they need to significantly limit the amount of data at risk. RPO is determined by the amount of time between data protection events and how much data could be lost during a disaster recovery. The company sought to improve the recovery time objective (RTO), which is the maximum length of downtime that can be tolerated after a disaster or failure.

The Solution

The company chose SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition. But before they deployed it, they ran a proof-of-concept (POC) to ensure it would provide the required functionality. The POC was a stress test on both sides of the network, using very large simulated data files. Throughout the test, the IT staff watched SQL Server failover successfully and resume mirroring in a high change rate environment. Adding Unparalleled Configuration Flexibility, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software provides efficient host-based, block-level replication to synchronize storage on the SAN with local storage in their DR site. It adds the configuration flexibility to create a Windows Server Failover Clustering environment using your choice of SAN-based, SANless, or hybrid storage. After SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition passed the company’s stringent POC testing, they deployed it into their production environment. They created a three-node cluster. Comprising two SAN-based nodes in their primary, on-premises data center and one SANless node in their remote disaster recovery site.

The Results

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition synchronized replication among all three nodes in the cluster. At the same, it eliminated the bandwidth issue at the disaster recovery site. The company saw substantial improvement in both recovery point and recovery time objectives and reduced the cost of bandwidth. The company now uses SIOS DataKeeper to protect their important SQL Server in more than 18 cluster nodes.

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Cayan™ Protects Business Critical Applications, Enjoys High Availability Protection And Disaster Protection with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

Case Study: Cayan™ — SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

Cayan™ is the leading provider of payment technologies that give businesses a competitive advantage.

When Cayan decided to move to a larger, state-of-the-art data center, they looked for an affordable, easy-to-deploy way to provide high availability protection and disaster protection for the SQL Server database. Their Genius platform and other important applications run on SQL Server database.

Cayan IT staff decided to use SIOS #SANLess clusters. They built two-node clusters using standard Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). Next, they simply added SIOS DataKeeper™ Cluster Edition software as an ingredient. The SIOS software uses efficient, real time replication to synchronize local storage in the primary and remote cluster nodes. This made them appear to WSFC as a virtual SAN.

SIOS software has very intuitive configuration wizards. This enabled Cayan to deploy our platform and applications in the SANless clusters quickly and easily,

The SIOS software provided the protection Cayan needed to protect its important Windows applications. All these without the cost or performance impediments of a SAN. Since deploying their SANless clusters, Cayan has not experienced any downtime or data loss, and continues to enjoy high availability protection.