SIOS SANless clusters

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Solution Brief: SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments

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SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments

Solution Brief: SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments

SIOS SANless clusters are an easy, cost-efficient way to add disaster protection to your physical server-based cluster environment without the cost and complexity of an additional data center or disaster recovery site. Add a SIOS SANless cluster node in a cloud to your physical server-based cluster environment for efficient, real time, block level replication and disaster protection for your business critical applications. SIOS software enables failover of application instances across geographic locations and cloud availability zones or regions to provide site-wide, local, and regional disaster protection. SIOS SANless software lets you build a cluster using the local storage available to your physical, virtual, or cloud systems. SIOS software keeps local storage synchronized for high availability protection without the need for shared storage.

Configuration flexibility

Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within your organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, SIOS SANless software gives you the flexibility to build a fully automated, application-centric cluster and replication solution with your choice of industry standard hardware, replication schema, and deployment (active/active, active/passive).

SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments
SIOS SANless clusters span environments letting you protect data with high availability and disaster recovery without the cost and complexity of a remote disaster recovery site.

SIOS software lets you replicate between the configurations of your choice – between SAN and SANless environments and any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud configurations. No vendor lock in. No need for identical hardware at the source and destination.

Easy to use. Easy to own

You can build a SIOS SANless cluster and configure it in minutes using our intuitive interface. SIOS also makes monitoring and management of your clusters easy. The user-friendly management console lets you monitor the status of protected servers, communication paths, resources and applications at glance.

Key Benefits

Disaster Protection

• Easy, cost efficient high availability and disaster protection for business critical applications

Flexibility

• Mix physical server and cloud environments for maximum efficiency.

Ease of Use

• Intuitive console for easy ongoing monitoring and management.

Download Solution Brief on SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments

Solution Brief: High Availability Clusters for SAP in Linux Environments

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Comprehensive SAP protection, including high availability, data replication, and disaster recovery in an easy, cost-efficient solution.

Solution Brief: High Availability Clusters for SAP in Linux Environments

Enterprises need their business-critical SAP system to continue to operate through hardware failures, administrator errors, routine maintenance and site-wide disasters. Even brief periods of downtime for business critical SAP systems can have devastating consequences, including production and supply chain interruption, delivery delays, lost sales, payroll delays, customer service degradation, contractual liabilities and regulatory fines. However, SAP offers little or no native support for clustering, replication or disaster recovery functions and custom-developed Linux-based solutions can be expensive, complicated, and error-prone. SIOS Protection Suite™ for Linux software provides comprehensive SAP protection, including high availability, data replication, and disaster recovery in an easy, cost efficient solution. SIOS software supports both JAVA and ABAP versions of SAP servers running on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and accommodates a wide range of storage architectures.

Easy Configuration Lets You Build a Cluster in Minutes

SIOS software provides an intuitive, wizard-based interface that makes configuration and implementation of your SAP cluster easy.

Continuous Monitoring of the Entire SAP Environment

Unlike traditional clustering software that only checks that the server is alive, SIOS Protection Suite software monitors the health of the system and provides application aware high availability to ensure maximum uptime. SIOS software verifies that SAP is running, file shares or NFS exports are available, databases are mounted and available, and clients are able to connect. SIOS software actively monitors: servers, operating systems, SAP Primary Application Server (PAS) Instance, ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS) Instance, backend databases (Oracle, DB2, MaxDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL), SAP HANA, the SAP Central Services Instance (SCS), volumes or file systems, file shares or NFS mounts, IP and virtual IP, Enqueue and message servers, and Logical Volumes (LVM).

Comprehensive SAP protection, including high availability, data replication, and disaster recovery in an easy, cost-efficient solution.

Automatic or Manual Failover

SIOS clusters can also stop and restart the application both locally and on another cluster server at either the same site or at another geographic location.

When the SIOS software detects a problem, it automatically initiates one of three configurable recovery actions that will maximize uptime and protection for applications and data: it may attempt a restart on the same server; switchover to a standby server; or alert a system administrator. It performs both local recovery or complete failover quickly and easily.

Eliminate Planned Downtime

In addition to protecting against unplanned outages and downtime, you can use SIOS Protection Suite to eliminate downtime associated with planned maintenance by manually migrating services and client connections between systems.

SAN or SANless Clusters

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux offers two options for continuous data availability – SAN-based or SANless clusters. Use SIOS Protection Suite to create a SANless cluster by replicating from local storage on the active SAP Server to local storage on a standby server, using real time, blocklevel replication that can operate in either synchronous or asynchronous mode. In the event of a failure on the active server, SIOS software moves SAP operation to the standby server, providing high availability without a costly SAN. SIOS software lets you configure standby servers that are either local or remote over a LAN or WAN. With real-time replication, SIOS software delivers immediate recovery from a local system failure, because an identical copy of the data is maintained on the backup server. It also allows the creation of multiple real-time copies through one-to-many replication.

SAP HANA Protection

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux can be used to control SAP HANA System Replication, which replicates all data to a secondary SAP HANA node. In this SAP HANA scale-up configuration, data is constantly pre-loaded on the secondary SAP HANA node.

SAP Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery and DR testing in SAP environments can be time consuming and result in significant data loss because the SAP databases need to be restored from the latest available backup. SIOS Protection Suite software eliminates these challenges by quickly and easily resuming SAP operations in the event of a disaster without data loss. The SIOS software makes DR testing easy by allowing administrators to move SAP to the DR site for testing and to move it back to the primary site when testing is done. It also lets you leave SAP in service in the primary site while completing DR testing with no impact to your production network by unlocking the target data, bringing SAP into service on the backup system to verify recovery. SIOS Protection Suite software makes SAP/Linux clusters easy to use and easy to own.

Key Benefits

Provide Superior Protection

• Protects your entire SAP stack including HANA with high availability clustering, continuous data replication, and disaster recovery functionality

• Enables single- and multi-site clusters using existing servers and storage

Make Clusters Easy

• Intuitive, wizard-driven GUI simplifies installation, configuration and management

• Supports physical, virtual or cloud environments and a wide range of storage architectures

Save Money

• Eliminates the cost, complexity and single point of failure risk of SAN storage

• Reduces data transfer costs in cloud environments

• Efficient replication engine minimizes network traffic—without hardware accelerators or compression devices.

• Saves labor cost by automating data replication tasks using an intuitive management console

Download our Solution Brief High Availability Clusters for SAP in Linux Environments

Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments

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High Availability for SQL Server

Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments

SIOS software provides a simple, cost-efficient way to provide high availability protection for SQL Server in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Add SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to a Windows Server Failover Clustering Environment such as SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) to create a cloud-friendly SANless cluster. Use AWS Quickstart deployment templates to create a SIOS SANless cluster in minutes.

Fast, Cost-Efficient Way to Add High Availability

Like all traditional failover clustering solutions, SQL Server FCI environments require the use of a shared storage. This requirement makes them impractical or impossible in public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services. SIOS SANless clustering software eliminates this requirement in an environment that is fully integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering. SIOS software adds the flexibility to protect your business critical applications such as SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition in Windows or Linux and any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Fast, Efficient Synchronization

SIOS software uses highly efficient block-level replication to synchronize storage in all cluster nodes in realtime to create a SANless cluster. By replicating data volumes at the block level, SIOS software use significantly fewer system resources, makes more efficient use of the available bandwidth and transfers more data faster across than file-based replication alternatives. As a result, SIOS software delivers incredibly fast replication speeds—without hardware accelerators or compression devices. You get efficient storage without the cost or configuration limitations of a traditional SAN-based environment.

Failover Across Availability Zones for Disaster Protection

It keeps real-time copies of data synchronized across multiple nodes and across EC2 Availability Zones (AZs) for availability and disaster protection.

High Availability with SQL Server Standard Edition

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software can be used with SQL Server Standard Edition FCI to create a cost-efficient high availability cluster without the need for more costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses.

Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments

Key Benefits

Enables Clustering in the Cloud

• Makes cluster failover protection in cloud environments possible by eliminating the need for shared storage.

• Fully integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC)

Protection for Applications and Data

• High availability and disaster protection in a cloud environment.

Ease of Use

• AWS Quick Start deployment templates

• Intuitive console for easy ongoing AWS monitoring and management.

Download our Solution Brief High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments

Case Study: SIOS AppKeeper Gives Hobby Japan Peace of Mind and Enables Employees to Produce the Best Content Possible

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“We cannot prevent configuration errors or load issues. But SIOS AppKeeper is very good for my peace of mind. With AppKeeper, our staff is not being called every time a system or server failure occurs,” said Yuichiro Fukabori of Hobby Japan. “Our goal is to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment and SIOS AppKeeper helps us do that.” Hobby Japan is a publishing company with diverse businesses related to hobbies (e.g. anime, action figure collecting, card games, etc.) that includes publishing young-adult books and magazines such as “Hobby Japan”, “Monthly Arms” and “Card Game.” The company also sells figures and character goods, game planning tools, and imports and selling analog games. Yuichiro Fukabori from the Public Relations, Business Administration department of Hobby Japan describes the company as “a general trading company that offers almost everything related to hobbies.”

The Environment

Hobby Japan does not have a dedicated IT department. Many of its employees hold multiple roles, and while he is a member of the public relations team, Mr. Fukabori also manages the company’s web servers. “Since there is no IT department within the company, I am in charge of the operation of all servers except those that are managed by each department,” said Mr. Fukabori. It is easy to imagine that he is in a difficult situation.
Hobby Japan used to rely on a hosting services company to manage their web server, but they experienced a disaster when they had a hard drive failure. While they were able to eventually recover the data, the situation exposed that they needed better data backup and security processes.

Cloud services were becoming more popular in Japan, so Mr. Fukabori led the effort to transition the company to the cloud. Hobby Japan migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2013. Thereby, freeing them from various problems they had experienced in the past.

But website traffic started to increase steadily, putting pressure on their environment. Mr. Fokabori was tasked with addressing this issue. He needed something that could ensure high availability and high performance.

The Challenge

Hobby Japan was monitoring their EC2 environment with AWS Cloud Watch. But Mr. Fukabori was unable to respond properly when the webserver traffic spiked, such as when the Monthly Hobby Japan issue was posted. He only received a notification at the time of the server downtime. Moreover, he noted, ”When our content was introduced on a popular video site or our figures were posted on Twitter, we also experienced unexpected increases in server traffic, frequently resulting in more downtime,” he said.

The company was experiencing systems issues about 10 times a month and Mr. Fukabori was busy addressing them. Alerts would often occur in the middle of the night, disturbing Mr. Fukabori’s sleep and home life. He thought, “I can’t handle this by myself” and asked AWS for help.

AWS introduced Hobby Japan to ForgeVision, Inc, an AWS consulting partner that provides cloud integration services. ForgeVision proposed three improvements for High Availability and implemented them in August 2018.

The first was to implement auto-scaling for Hobby Japan’s EC2 instances to enable an automatic and scalable response when access overload occurred. AWS Auto Scaling quickly stabilized their server operations. “Thanks to Auto Scaling, we did not have any trouble during our Summer animation broadcasting day in 2018 when many users accessed our server simultaneously,” said Mr. Fukabori. Monthly incidents were reduced from 10 times per month to one or two times per month, allowing him to return to a more normal lifestyle.

The second improvement was the implementation of a visualization tool to allow Hobby Japan to check access status and resource utilization. And the third improvement was to reduce operational loads by introducing AWS operations management service.

But Hobby Japan still had another issue. ForgeVision’s AWS operations and management services delivered systems failure notifications around the clock. But their team was only available to address issues between 10 AM and 6 PM on weekdays. Because website traffic often increased at night, Hobby Japan realized that they needed additional help to address this issue.

“I don’t want to worry as much about the system or servers. If we could afford to, we would like to completely outsource the monitoring and management of our environment, but it would cost more,” said Mr. Fukabori. “We produce high-quality content, but that work will be in vain if we cannot provide it at the right timing due to server downtime. Therefore, we need a system environment that is as automated as possible.”

ForgeVision suggested that Hobby Japan take a look at SIOS AppKeeper which would provide the high availability that it needed.

The Evaluation

Hobby Japan started using AppKeeper on the five websites they run. ”We understood the functionality and didn’t need to spend time on a special evaluation process. We started using it immediately,” said Mr. Fukabori.

The Solution

SIOS AppKeeper is offered as a cloud software-as-a-service solution that supports the automatic monitoring and restoration of AWS EC2 services and instances. It monitors them via the AWS API and detects and recovers from failures quickly.

AppKeeper restores the application operation automatically by detecting and first restarting application services. This step typically restores services in seconds. If a restart of the service fails, it then restarts the entire instance. It issues a failure report that shows any failure occurrences and recoveries based on the relevant information obtained before and after the recovery from the virtual machine, services, and AWS.

If customers select the EC2 Auto Scaling functionality, they can easily add more instances for AppKeeper protection. AppKeeper will scale to monitor these new instances in near real-time and, if desired, apply designated settings automatically.

The Results

Since most failures can be resolved by restarting the instance or rebooting the service, SIOS AppKeeper quickly addresses these issues. It provides peace of mind even at night when IT people cannot address the failures. Mr. Fukabori decided to implement SIOS AppKeeper at Hobby Japan in April 2019, with the anticipation that the solution would add a new sense of security in the operations management.

SIOS AppKeeper hasn’t encountered any issues that it could not automatically recover from, giving Mr. Fukabori and his team the reassurance of knowing that they had a fail-safe mechanism to automatically recover their systems if a failure occurred.

“Of course, human error can not be prevented, but the introduction of SIOS AppKeeper has been very good for my peace of mind,” said Mr. Fukabori.

“I feel that we are one step closer to an environment where I can stay calm even when too many people are trying to access our popular content,” he said. “The ability to enable a maintenance-free, care-free environment at low cost is the SIOS AppKeeper’s advantage.”

Learn more about SIOS AppKeeper to enjoy High Availability and High Performance

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Case Study: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Hospital Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

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Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Hospital Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

Case Study: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Hospital Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

SIOS Chosen for its Ability to Deliver both High Availability and High Performance

ChrisOBrien-Lifehouse logoChris O’Brien Lifehouse (www.mylifehouse.org.au) is an integrated and focused center of excellence specializing in state-of-the-art treatment and research for patients who are suffering from rare and complex cancer cases. Lifehouse offers everything a cancer patient might need in one place, including advanced oncology-surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, clinical trials, research, education, complementary therapies and psychosocial support. Situated alongside Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the University of Sydney in Camperdown, the not-for-profit hospital sees more than 40,000 patients annually for screening, diagnosis and treatment. As one of Australia’s largest clinical trial centers, Lifehouse also provides its patients access to the world’s latest cancer treatment breakthroughs.

The Environment

Lifehouse uses the MEDITECH healthcare Electronic Medical Record and patient administration system, which stores the electronic health records for all patients in a database.

“The health information system and database are vital to the care we provide, and if either goes down, patient records would not be accessible, and that would paralyze the hospital’s operations,” explains Peter Singer, Director Information Technology at Lifehouse.

In the hospital’s datacenter, mission-critical uptime has been provided by Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) running on a Storage Area Network (SAN). But like many organizations, Lifehouse wanted to migrate to the cloud to take advantage of its superior agility and affordability.

The Challenge

Lifehouse chose Amazon Web Services as its cloud service provider, and had hoped to “lift and shift” its environment directly to the AWS cloud. To simulate its on-premises configuration, Peter chose a “cloud volumes” service available in the AWS Marketplace. Failover clusters were configured using software defined storage volumes to share data between active and standby instances, and testing proved that the approach could provide the automatic failover needed to satisfy the hospital’s demanding recovery point and recovery time objectives.

There was a problem, however: The use of software-defined cloud volumes had a substantial adverse impact on throughput performance. With so many elements and layers involved, performance problems are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot in software defined configurations deployed in the cloud. With the “No Protection” option specified, the cloud volumes performed well. But “No Protection” was not really an option for the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

“We were able to go from testing to production in a matter of days. Ongoing maintenance is also quite simple, which we expect will minimize our operational expenditures associated with high availability and disaster recovery,” said Peter who is responsible for mission-critical MEDITECH application and its database. “We made every reasonable effort to find and fix the root cause, and eventually concluded that software-defined storage would never be able to deliver the throughput performance we needed,” Peter recalls. So the team at Lifehouse began looking for another solution.

The Evaluation

In its search for another solution capable of providing both high availability and high performance, Lifehouse established three criteria:

  • Validation for use in the AWS cloud
  • Ability to work across multiple Availability Zones
  • Performance that was as good as or better than what had been achieved on-premises
  • Security / Privacy with support for encryption in motion and at rest

Validation was important to minimize risk associated with using a third-party solution in the cloud. The ability to work across multiple Availability Zones would assure business continuity in the event an entire AWS datacenter was impacted by a localized disaster. The sub-millisecond latency AWS delivers between Availability Zones would be critical to being able to replicate data synchronously to “hot” standby instances to meet the hospital’s demanding recovery time and recovery point objectives.

After conducting an exhaustive search, Peter concluded that the best available solution was SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition from SIOS Technology. SIOS DataKeeper was available on the AWS Marketplace, which assured it was proven to operate reliably in the AWS cloud. And because it did not use software-defined storage, Peter was confident SIOS DataKeeper would be able to deliver the performance Lifehouse needed.

The Solution

SIOS DataKeeper provides the high-performance, synchronous data replication Lifehouse needs. By using real-time, block-level data mirroring between the local storage attached to all active and standby instances, the solution overcomes the problems caused by the lack of a SAN in the cloud, including the poor performance that often plagues software-defined storage. The resulting SANless cluster is compatible with Windows Server Failover Clustering, provides continuous monitoring for detecting failures at the application and database levels, and offers configurable policies for failover and failback.

Lifehouse currently has eight instances in SANless failover clusters to support its MEDITECH application and database across different AWS availability zones to protect against widespread disasters. The latency inherent across the long distances involved normally requires the use of asynchronous data replication to avoid delaying commits to the active instance of the database. But the real-time, block level data mirroring technology used in SIOS DataKeeper still enables Peter Singer to achieve a near-zero recovery point.

The Results

Unlike software-defined shared storage, SIOS DataKeeper is purpose-built for high performance high availability, so it came as no surprise to Peter Singer that the cloudbased configuration now works as needed. What was a bit surprising was just how easy the solution has been to implement and operate: “We were able to go from testing to production in a matter of days. Ongoing maintenance is also quite simple, which we expect will minimize our operational expenditures associated with high availability and disaster recovery.”

SIOS DataKeeper has enabled Lifehouse to take full advantage of the economies of scale afforded in the cloud without sacrificing uptime or performance. “If it were not for SIOS, we might not have been able to migrate our environment to the cloud,” Peter Singer concluded.

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