high availability solutions Archives

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

What SIOS can do for you?

With SIOS, get ready to enjoy high availability cluster protection for 70% less than SQL Enterprise Edition, Oracle Enterprise Edition/ RAC. On top of that, save running costs from not having to migrate to a certain vendors’ cloud platform for extended support.

Rest assured. SIOS is SAP certified for all major Linux and cloud providers, hence you can easily achieve High Availability and Disaster Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). Thereby, allowing snapshot-based backups to succeed.

Best of all, overcome technical limitations of native features from application and database software vendors.

No Configuration Limitations

SIOS is a high availability solution that is suitable for use in any Windows/Linus Application on Physical, Virtual, Public/Virtual Cloud.

Why Sell SIOS HA Solutions

SIOS has been a high availability solutions leader for 20 years, with its strength as a simple add-on to fit any HA environment. Specifically focusing on channel sales, the great margins translate to cost reduction for customers by more than 60% . You will be provided with sales support and given marketing opportunities. Most of all, you can be guaranteed access to a world-class technical support team.

SIOS strives to solve customers’ challenges by providing usable solutions.

Benefits for MSSQL customers

Use SIOS Datakeeper with AlwaysOn FCI on SQL standard edition with no need for Enterprise Edition, thereby saving more than 66% of cost. Maintain support even after migrating customers’ old MSSQL 2008 to cloud. SIOS supports multinode cluster (MS limitation), and provides protection for Master System Databases (Master, MSD). Also, it protects other files and applications other than MSSQL

Benefits for Oracle customers

SIOS offers protection for Oracle DB and 75% cost savings with Oracle standard edition. Use SIOS with STD edition and continue to get High Availability even as Oracle ends RAC support for STD edition from v.19c onward. SIOS is less complex than Dataguard and RAC, thereby reducing administrative time and costs. Enjoy the ease and flexibility to run Oracle DB with High Availability on any cloud provider platform. Protect other files and applications not just Oracle DB.

Benefits for SAP customers

With its easy implementation, application protection wizards, and management via GUI, be sure to save time and cost on your projects. No change from on-premises clustering design and versions used as you migrate to cloud by “life-and-shift”.

As a high availability solution, SIOS promises to offer protection that SAP does not cover. Automatic failure detection and failover orchestration for HANA and Central Services with automatic ERS switchover to opposite node (feature not provided by opensource/HAE). Certified by SAP for any cloud provider and and linux flavor. This includes Oracle Linux with SAP in public cloud providers All SAP customers enjoy commercial-grade replication and tech support.

Benefits for VMware environments

Achieve High Availability, Data Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). This allows for snapshot backups that is not supported with VMware HA. Additionally, you get to enjoy cost savings since there is no need for single-point-of-failure SAN or SAN-to-SAN replication for High Availability, Data Recovery. Similarly, this ends the need for complex vSphere replication for DR of applications like SQL, SAP, Oracle etc. With SIOS, you’ll easily achieve full application monitoring and automated failover. Furthermore, this feature is not provided by VMware HA, only VM and host failures.

The solution is specifically designed for HA with full stack monitoring (server, VM, application, network, split-brain). Like a hybrid our high availability solution works on-premises with any VM-to-any Cloud.

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The Availability Equation

Are you familiar with the Availability Equation? In a nutshell, this equation shows how the total time needed to restore an application to usability is equal to the time required to detect that an application is experiencing a problem plus the time required to perform a recovery action:

T_RESTORE = T_DETECT + T_RECOVER

Key Concepts Of High Availability Solutions

The equation introduces the key concepts of high availability (HA): clustering, problem detection, and subsequent recovery. HA solutions monitor the health of business application components; when problems are detected, these solutions act to restore them to service. The objective of deploying high availability solutions is to minimize downtime.

Reducing detection and recovery times are two important tasks of any HA solution that you choose to deploy. Today’s applications are combinations of technologies: servers, storage, network infrastructure, and so on. When reviewing your HA options, be certain that you understand the technologies that each solution uses to detect and recover from all outage types. Each technology has a direct impact on service restoration times.

Local Detection And Recovery

High availability solutions are straightforward. One technology that is crucial to providing the fastest possible restoration time is known as local detection and recovery (aka service-level problem detection and recovery). In a basic clustering solution, servers are connected. They are configured that one or more servers can take over the operations of another in the event of a server failure. The server nodes in the cluster continuously send small data packets, often called heartbeat signals, to each other to indicate that they are “alive”.

In simple clustered environments, when one server stops generating heartbeats, other cluster members assume that this server is down. It will then begin the process of taking over responsibility for that server’s domain of operation. This approach is adequate for detecting failure at the server level. But unless problems cause the interruption or cessation of heartbeat signals, server-level detection is inadequate. More than that, it can actually magnify the extent and impact of an outage.

For example, if Apache processes hang, the server may still send heartbeats. Even though the Web server subsystem has ceased to perform its primary function. Rather than restart the Apache subsystem on the same or a different server, a basic server-level clustering solution would restart the entire software stack of the failed server on a backup server, thereby causing interruption to users and extending recovery time.

How It Works

Using local detection and recovery, advanced clustering solutions deploy health-monitoring agents within individual cluster servers, to monitor individual system components such as a file system, a database, user-level application, IP address, and so on. These agents use heuristics that are specific to the monitored component. Therefore, the agents can predict and detect operational issues and then take the most appropriate recovery action. Often, the most efficient recovery method is to stop and restart the problem subsystem on the same server.

The time to restore an application to user availability can be greatly reduced by enabling recovery within the same physical server. Also, by detecting failures at a more granular level than simply by observing server-level heartbeats. Solutions such as the SteelEye Protection Suite for Linux from SIOS provides this level of detection and recovery for your environment. Make certain that whichever HA solution you deploy can also support local detection and recovery.

Would you like to enjoy high availability solutions for your projects? Check in with us. Need more references, here are our success stories.
Reproduced with permission from Linuxclustering