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Planning is Key to Enterprise Availability (and to a Happy Marriage)

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Planning is Key to Enterprise Availability (and to a Happy Marriage)

Planning is Key to Enterprise Availability (and to a Happy Marriage)

Planning dates and getaways, fabulously romantic dinners are a great part of loving your spouse well.  Seminars and workshops overflowing with tips for improving your relationship abound in nearly every area of the world.

But, listen in on the training session provided by SIOS Technology Corp. Project Manager for Professional Services, Edmond Melkomian, and you’ll quickly learn that planning dinners and anniversary retreats aren’t the only way to love your spouse well.

In a recent class on SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, Edmond shared three tips that help you love your spouse well in an enterprise world: plan, plan, plan.

1.   “Plan to plan” your enterprise availability solution

1. “Plan to plan” your enterprise availability solution

In his course, Edmond Melkomian asked students to name the first thing you should do when deploying an enterprise solution.  His answer, “Plan, plan, plan.”  It seems obvious, but the first step is to start making the plan.  A fairly decent start for a plan includes developing the details for each of the project phases, such as milestones, checkpoints, risks, risk mitigation and strategies, stakeholders, timelines, stakeholder communication plans.  A decent plan will also include details about kickoff, sign-off and closure, and resources (staffing, management, legal/contracts).

Plan to create, review, modify, and update your plan throughout the solution lifecycle.

2.   Plan what to deploy for enterprise availability

Plan what to deploy.  It is likely that a large portion of your enterprise infrastructure exists beyond the realm of the current team’s lifespan with your company.  As you migrate to the cloud, or update your availability strategy, it is worth the time and effort to make a plan regarding what to deploy.  Focus your plan on ensuring that you deploy redundancy at all critical components, network, compute, storage, power, cooling, and applications.  All data centers and cloud providers typically ensure cooling, power, and network redundancy to start.

A number of firms offer architectural teams, cloud solution providers, availability experts, application architects, and migration specialists who help teams discover critical and sometimes hidden dependencies as well as high risk areas vulnerable to Single Points of Failure (SPOF’s).  This investigative work will feed into your plan of what to deploy and/or update in your availability strategy.

Plan on reviewing what you need to deploy.

3.   Plan to keep a QA/pre-production cluster for reliable availability

When I was in the SIOS Technology Corp. development team, I’ll never forget a Friday night call with a long time, but frantic customer.  Earlier in the month a frequent customer unsuccessfully deployed a new software solution into a production environment.  The result was a massive failure.  He called our 800 number at 4:30pm (EST) on Friday.  Why do I recall that exact time?  Friday was date night.  My wife and I had dinner plans, a babysitter for the six girls on standby (by the hour), and hopes for a romantic and relaxing evening.  I was just about to head out for the day when the phone rang.  After a tense first hour, we were back up and running.  This unfortunate episode could have been avoided or mitigated by keeping a UAT or QA system on hand.

As Harrison Howell, the Software Engineer for Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. noted in his blog 6-common-cloud-migration-challenges the limits of on-prem are no longer the same limits.

Customers coming from an on-prem system need to remember that resources are no longer a limiting factor. In the cloud, systems can be effortlessly copied and run in isolation of production, something not trivial on-premises. On-demand access to IT resources allows UAT of HA and DR to expand beyond “shut down the primary node”. Networks can be sabotaged, kernels can be panicked, even databases can be corrupted and none of this will impact production! Identifying and testing these scenarios improves HA and DR posture.

Plan on deploying and keeping a UAT system for HA and DR testing.  As Harrison mentions, “identifying and testing [issues]” “improves [your overall] HA and DR posture,” and that improves your chances of a successful date night.

4.   Plan regular maintenance and updates (including documentation)

Lastly, plan times for regular maintenance and updates to maintain Enterprise Availability.  Your enterprise needs to remain highly available to remain highly profitable and successful.  Environments don’t remain stagnant, and patches, security updates, expansion, and general maintenance are a regular occurrence from inception to retirement.  Creating a plan for how and when you will incorporate updates and maintenance into your enterprise will ensure that you are not only kept up to date, but that you minimize risks and downtime while doing it.  Be sure to include in your plan the use of a test system.  Develop a planned routine and process for validating patches, kernel and OS updates, and security software, and don’t forget to update the project documentation and future plans as you go and grow.

If you can remember to plan for a highly redundant, highly reliable and highly available system upfront, plan to keep a QA/Pre-production cluster after Go-Live, and plan for regular maintenance and updates you will also be able to keep your plans with your spouse for date night.  And not just date night, but you’ll also be able to keep your night’s free from 3am wake up calls due to down production systems.  This is my tip for loving your spouse well.

I love my wife and so I help customers deploy SIOS Technology Corp.’s DataKeeper Cluster Edition and SIOS Protection Suite for Windows and Linux products as a part of a highly available enterprise protection solution.  Contact SIOS.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Article reproduced with permission from SIOS

 

High Availability Software is Insurance Against SAP Downtime

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We all need to buy insurance – for our cars, our houses, our lives. Nobody likes to pay money for a service that we hope we never have to use. But we all know that we should have it just in case. Most people either put off insurance until something awful happens, buy the cheapest, or actually do their homework and buy it from someone they trust.  This last group usually fares the best.

High Availability Software is Insurance Against Downtime

Insurance is often for consumers, but it’s critical to businesses too. You have computer systems and applications that run your business.  If they fail for some reason, you want your business to continue to run or it could cost millions of dollars in lost business through lost transactions and customer data, and irreparable damage to your reputation with your customers. High availability software is your “insurance” against system downtime. This is not something you can ignore. This is not something you can trust that will come along with your hardware or software infrastructure. You want to use high availability solutions from a company that has decades of expertise in high availability and knows how to keep your systems up and running.

A trusted high availability software company should: 

  • Provide a single solution that is platform agnostic – usable on-prem, in the cloud, and on all of your hardware and software platforms
  • Have a product that is easy to configure and set up without having considerable application expertise
  • Know your applications and when your applications are having a problem
  • Take the proper action to attempt to restart or failover applications
  • Fail over the application to a secondary server, maintaining application best practices, and bringing the application back up in the proper order

One of the key applications used in enterprises today is SAP S/4HANA, based on the HANA in-memory database.  Most SAP customers will be required to run the HANA database with SAP by 2025.  You want to find an intelligent HANA availability solution from a company that knows high availability, that knows SAP, knows HANA, and knows what to do to ensure that your critical SAP applications, and your business, continue to run smoothly.

SIOS Technology is the company you can trust for a reliable High Availability Software. The 9.5 release of the LifeKeeper for Linux product contains a new HANA Application Recovery Kit. This will provide you with all you need to keep your SAP and HANA environment running.  Want more information about this release? Watch this interview.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Test/QA Systems are a Critical Part of Enterprise Availability

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Test/QA Systems are a Critical Part of Enterprise Availability

Test/QA Systems are a Critical Part of Enterprise Availability

“I could kiss you,” that’s what a friend blurted out to me nearly three decades ago as she ran towards me. She had dropped her reeds for her saxophone on the way to one of the biggest band competitions in our region. I didn’t know whose they were, but when I saw the pack of reeds on the seat on the bus I picked them up and took them with me to the warm-up area. Three minutes into her warm-up, her 1st reed cracked and she panicked as she reached into empty pockets for replacements. When I piped up that I had found them, she blurted out, “I could kiss you right now.”

As the VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. I have the unique and distinct pleasure of working with a number of enterprise customers and partners at different phases of the availability spectrum. Sometimes I have the opportunity of working with end customers for issue resolution, mitigation, and improvements. At other times our teams are actively working with partners and customers to architect and implement enterprise availability to protect their systems from downtime. A recent customer experience reminded me of something that happened nearly 30 years ago when my friend blurted out, “I could kiss you.”

My team and I were on a customer call. The call began with the usual pleasantries, introductions, and an overview of the customer’s enterprise environment. Thirty minutes into the call, things were going so well. Their architecture was solid, thoughtful, and well documented. Their team was knowledgeable, technically sound, and experienced. But then, the customer intimated that due to cost savings they would not be planning to maintain a dedicated test/quality system. I took a deep breath.  Actually it was more of an exhale like the rush of air from a gut punch. I prepared to respond, but before I could a voice broke through.  “The number one cause of downtime is lack of process,” exclaimed the Partner Rep Architect on the call with us. After a brief banter, the customer agreed to maintain a test/QA system and I nearly blurted out, “I could kiss you!”

On the front lines of many Enterprise deployments (new systems, data center migrations, and system updates) my teams in Support and Services have seen dozens of issues that could have been mediated by utilizing a test system/cluster.

A test/quality system is an invaluable part of an HA strategy to avoid downtime. Common tasks associated with maintaining an enterprise deployment such as patches, updates, and configuration changes come with risk. Enormous risk.

Commonly identified risks of testing in production include several serious and potentially catastrophic issues: 

  • Corrupted or invalid data
  • Leaked protected data
  • Incorrect revenue recognition (canceled orders, etc.)
  • Overloaded systems
  • Unintended side effects or impacts on other production systems
  • High error rates that set off alerts and page people on-call
  • Skewed analytics (traffic funnels, A/B test results, etc.)
  • Inaccurate traffic logs full of script and bot activity (a)

If a customer attempts to apply risky changes in production, the result can be quite damaging. On top of those listed above, there is an increased risk of downtime, corruption of application installations, and in some cases irreversible damage. Take the case of Customer X (a high profile SAP Enterprise shop in the manufacturing industry).

After reading a critical notice from a reputable site, the OS Administrator quickly updated his production nodes to the latest kernel update available. Within hours the Production nodes began a series of uninitiated crashes and kernel panics. In his haste, he had installed a kernel that was incompatible with his configuration; the combination of existing application packages, devices, file systems, and related packages. This caused a production outage and several high priority escalations to multiple vendors.

When patches are applied to a test/QA or sandbox system, patches and critical fixes can be managed and verified to reduce loss of productivity and unplanned downtime. Testing applications in a production-like environment allows you to identify unforeseen problems and correct the issues before they adversely impact your operations. Pre-production design and testing eliminate costly business disruption, improve your customer experience and protect your brand.

Using a test QA System to Improve Production Availability and Processes

Here are the basics that using a test/QA system, can provide for improving your production availability and processes. A controlled environment, that is similar (it must resemble production as close as possible) to the production environment, provides the ability to:

  1. Test kernel updates and security updates
  2. Validate settings and configuration tuning
  3. Reproduce production issues and test software updates and patches
  4. Verify application version compatibility and reduce the risk of downtime due to incompatible changes
  5. Provide a safe space to practice and revise go-live, maintenance, outage, and other enterprise procedural activities
  6. Train new hires and team members without impacting enterprise clients

If you have a Test/QA environment for deploying your critical enterprise availability software, I could kiss you right now. Having this environment gives your team the ability “to test, validate and verify(2)” architecture, business requirements, user scenarios, and general integration with a system or set of systems that most closely resembles the production environment- you know the one that makes the money. Of course, you will still have to schedule windows to maintain your production systems and perform testing on them as well, but after a safe buffer step has been completed in between.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

————-

References:

  1. https://opensource.com/article/19/5/dont-test-production Accessed 5/4/2020
  2. https://www.softwaretestingclass.com/system-testing-what-why-how/ Accessed 5/4/2020

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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