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CMS Wire: Can the Cloud Handle Failover from SharePoint and CMS?

April 8, 2015 by Margaret Hoagland

A new service that leverages Microsoft’s Azure cloud for large-scale extended storage could enable more, and perhaps smaller, businesses to host their own applications in a hybrid cloud configuration.

SIOS Technology’s DataKeeper Cluster Edition is a service that could compel CIOs to think differently about “the cloud” than just that place where all the Dropbox files hang out together.

Most discussions of cloud storage in the pages of CMSWire are about file repositories, file sharing and document-based collaboration. For some CIOs, “the cloud” is the general name for Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever space all those various shared documents cohabitate.

The Success of Failover

So topics like failover clustering don’t usually merit a lot of space here.

That may change because of the following: Many of the on-premise databases maintained by CMS applications are not, in the formal sense, data warehouses. Or data garages or data lakes or any of the other myriad metaphors intended to infuse this subject with interest and intrigue.

But these databases (as we can attest to first-hand) are getting larger. So now we are seeing failover clustering — a common technology for replicating data at the block level to ensure availability — being extended to the cloud.

This trend began quietly in February 2014 with Amazon’s AWS Storage Gateway being adapted to support Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and VMWare ESX iSCSI Initiator.

This enables applications hosted in VMware’s vSphere virtualization environment to recognize the AWS cloud as its failover cluster — which, in turn, enables smaller businesses with fewer internal data center resources to embrace more powerful on-premise applications, including in the CMS category.

Shared Nothing

Last week, SIOS Technology began competing with this approach by making its DataKeeper service connect to Microsoft’s Azure using the same WSFC protocol.

This way, SharePoint, SQL Server, Dynamics and other high-volume Windows software (the kind you find running these days in vSphere) can be easily configured to recognize Azure-based storage in a more failure-proof, “shared-nothing” architecture.

It’s the “shared-nothing” part that should get your attention.

“If I asked somebody to draw on a whiteboard what a cluster should look like, they would draw two or more servers and then some type of shared storage, typically that would be a SAN,” said Tony Tomarchio, SIOS’ director of field engineering, in an interview with CMSWire.

Of course, he’s referring to a storage-area network.

Naturally, administering a SAN oneself carries costs.

“But technically, a SAN is a single point of failure,” Tomarchio continued.

“If the shared storage, which all the cluster nodes are connecting into, has an issue, it could take down your entire cluster.”

In a shared-nothing architecture such as a SIOS SANless cluster, all the storage nodes are isolated and independent from one another.

It’s a failover cluster that, at least architecturally speaking, more legitimately earns its title because it’s more failure-tolerant.

SIOS had been producing block-level data replication software that pools together local storage devices into SANless, but shared, arrays. This way, higher-speed servers using local SSD devices (all-flash memory) could be leveraged as failover clusters — a lot less expensive than, say, an all-flash SAN.

“We present our replicated disk as a cluster disk, which looks and feels like it’s shared storage to the cluster,” explained Tomarchio, “when in reality, it’s not.

Which application you decide to protect within the cluster, is completely up to you.”

How This Relates to CMS

CMS systems such as Drupal cast their databases in an abstract fashion, so that they’re not restricted to single database formats. This abstraction means that drivers are used to connect Drupal to common database management systems such as SQL Server.

So it is no coincidence that the data most often replicated on SIOS SANless clusters, as Tomarchio told us, belongs to SQL Server. Highly available (HA) file-shares or HA Hyper-V virtual machines and SAP Central Services are other known use cases for DataKeeper, he noted.

“Because DataKeeper is a replication technology, we integrate with the cluster,” he said. “So this is an excellent solution for any clusterable service or application — not just SQL Server.”

View this article at CMS Wire

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: Azure, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Sharepoint, VMware

Press Release: SIOS DataKeeper SANLess Clustering Software is Now Microsoft Azure Certified and Available in the Azure Marketplace

April 2, 2015 by sios2017

Award-winning software provides high availability and disaster protection  for important applications in Azure.

SAN MATEO, CA – April 2, 2015 – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that its SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is Microsoft Azure certified and now available in the Azure Marketplace. The new SIOS offering is the only Azure certified software that enables customers to create a SANLess high availability cluster in Azure using Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering.

By adding SIOS DataKeeper software to Windows Server Failover Clustering customers can quickly and easily help protect business-critical Windows environments from downtime and data loss in a cloud or a combination of physical, virtual, or hybrid cloud environment. Now, for the first time, applications depending on SAN-based Windows server failover clusters for protection can be moved to Azure and achieve the more comprehensive high availability protection they need.

“We are pleased that Microsoft has chosen to certify and include SIOS DataKeeper in the Azure Marketplace. By providing fast, convenient access to SIOS DataKeeper software, our Azure Marketplace offering enables customers to deploy their important applications such as SQL, SAP, and Oracle in Azure with the same high availability protection they have in traditional physical server environments,” said Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology.

“Products like SIOS DataKeeper are pivotal in the cloud transformation,” said Vibhor Kapoor, Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure. “By providing the essential high availability protection for critical applications that enterprises need, SIOS and Azure are enabling customers to take their journey to the cloud with confidence.”

Along with its Azure Marketplace offering, SIOS provides an informative, step-by-step guide to creating a high availability failover cluster to protect SQL Server in Azure IaaS written by Microsoft MVP, David Bermingham.

The SIOS DataKeeper offering in the Azure Marketplace is at: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/sios-datakeeper/sios-datakeeper-8-bring-your-own-license/

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: #SANLess, #SANLess Clusters for Windows Environments, Azure, Cloud, Clusters Your Way, High Availability, Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft Certification

Data Center Post: Epicure Selections Achieves High Availability and Disaster Recovery Protection for Critical SQL Server Applications with SIOS Sanless Clustering Software

March 18, 2015 by Margaret Hoagland

Epicure Selections is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to easily and cost-efficiently provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. SANLess Clustering

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants.

Epicure relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrolment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.

The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition—one for each website running on a single server. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, Senior Network Infrastructure Administrator at Epicure.

As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. “The business is growing and we needed to ensure our website delivers an excellent user experience for our customers and consultants,” said Born.

As part of this update, Epicure wanted an efficient, cost-effective way to provide high availability and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition. “We didn’t want the added expense of moving to SQL Server Enterprise Edition if we could provide HA and DR with Standard Edition,” Born said.

Using SIOS SANLess clustering software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SIOS SANLess clusters and configured them using the software’s intuitive graphical user interface.

The SIOS software provides Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

About the Author:

Jerry Melnick
COO, SIOS Technology Corp.

Jerry Melnick (jmelnick@us.sios.com) is responsible for defining corporate strategy and operations at SIOS Technology Corp., 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.

Read this article at Data Center Post

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: #SANLess Clusters for SQL Server Environments, Cloud, Epicure, Epicure Selections, Hybrid Cloud, News

VI Briefing: Spirent Provides High Availability for Applications in Cloud with SIOS SANLess Clusters

March 10, 2015 by Margaret Hoagland

SIOS software delivers high availability for Siebel Gateway Server and file server applications

SAN MATEO, CA – March 10, 2015 – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Spirent is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to protect its business critical applications in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Because the SIOS software is integrated with Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), it did not add complexity and was easy for Spirent IT staff to deploy.

Spirent is a global leader in communications test and measurement with 20 locations in 15 countries worldwide. The company develops innovative hardware and software solutions and test methodologies for the communications industry. The Spirent IT department is continuously looking for ways to improve efficiency and maintain the highest quality of service to customers. They recognized that moving their operations to the Amazon cloud would provide a variety of benefits. “We saw an opportunity to gain significant flexibility, scalability, and efficiency by moving to the Amazon EC2 cloud,” said Sohamn Chatterjee, senior business systems architect, Spirent Communications. “This move lets us grow quickly and apply additional IT resources as our needs change.”

For the move to the cloud to be successful, Spirent IT staff needed to provide high availability for its Siebel Gateway Server and File Server application environments. “We could not move important applications to the cloud until we were sure that we would not be putting them at risk for downtime or data loss,” said Chatterjee. “The traditional shared storage clusters that we would have used in a physical environment require shared storage, which is not available in EC2.”

Spirent chose SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to protect its business critical applications. They built two-node clusters in the cloud using standard WSFC and adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software as an ingredient. The SIOS software uses efficient, real-time replication to synchronize storage between instances in different Availability Zones, making them appear to WSFC as a SAN.

“We were able to configure the clusters just as we would in a WSFC environment so we did not need specialized skills or a SAN administrator,” said Chatterjee. “The SIOS software enabled us to implement our move to the cloud efficiently.”

The SIOS software provided the protection Spirent needed to move its important applications to the cloud. Since their cluster deployment, they have not experienced any downtime or data loss in their Siebel or File Server environments. They have also found the SIOS SANLess clusters make failover/failback testing fast and easy. “We are very pleased with the SIOS software and the protection our SIOS SANLess clusters provide for both our Siebel Gateway Server and File Server application environments in the Amazon EC2 cloud,” said Chatterjee.

“An essential ingredient in any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and SANLess clustering software provides the flexibility to build clusters to protect any choice of Windows or Linux environment and any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) storage, without sacrificing performance or availability,” said Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology. “We are very impressed with Spirent’s innovative use case with two node clusters in the cloud.”

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

Read this article on VIBriefing.

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: #SANLess Clusters for Windows Environments, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Spirent

DR Journal: Spirent Provides High Availability for Applications in Cloud with SIOS SANLess Clusters

March 10, 2015 by Margaret Hoagland

SIOS software delivers high availability for Siebel Gateway Server and file server applications

SAN MATEO, Calif. – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Spirent is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to protect its business critical applications in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Because the SIOS software is integrated with Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), it did not add complexity and was easy for Spirent IT staff to deploy.

Spirent is a global leader in communications test and measurement with 20 locations in 15 countries worldwide. The company develops innovative hardware and software solutions and test methodologies for the communications industry. The Spirent IT department is continuously looking for ways to improve efficiency and maintain the highest quality of service to customers. They recognized that moving their operations to the Amazon cloud would provide a variety of benefits. “We saw an opportunity to gain significant flexibility, scalability, and efficiency by moving to the Amazon EC2 cloud,” said Sohamn Chatterjee, senior business systems architect, Spirent Communications. “This move lets us grow quickly and apply additional IT resources as our needs change.”

For the move to the cloud to be successful, Spirent IT staff needed to provide high availability for its Siebel Gateway Server and File Server application environments. “We could not move important applications to the cloud until we were sure that we would not be putting them at risk for downtime or data loss,” said Chatterjee. “The traditional shared storage clusters that we would have used in a physical environment require shared storage, which is not available in EC2.”

Spirent chose SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to protect its business critical applications. They built two-node clusters in the cloud using standard WSFC and adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software as an ingredient. The SIOS software uses efficient, real-time replication to synchronize storage between instances in different Availability Zones, making them appear to WSFC as a SAN.

“We were able to configure the clusters just as we would in a WSFC environment so we did not need specialized skills or a SAN administrator,” said Chatterjee. “The SIOS software enabled us to implement our move to the cloud efficiently.”

The SIOS software provided the protection Spirent needed to move its important applications to the cloud. Since their cluster deployment, they have not experienced any downtime or data loss in their Siebel or File Server environments. They have also found the SIOS SANLess clusters make failover/failback testing fast and easy. “We are very pleased with the SIOS software and the protection our SIOS SANLess clusters provide for both our Siebel Gateway Server and File Server application environments in the Amazon EC2 cloud,” said Chatterjee.

“An essential ingredient in any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and SANLess clustering software provides the flexibility to build clusters to protect any choice of Windows or Linux environment and any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) storage, without sacrificing performance or availability,” said Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology. “We are very impressed with Spirent’s innovative use case with two node clusters in the cloud.”

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.

Read  this article on DRJournal.

Filed Under: News and Events, News posts Tagged With: #SANLess Clusters for Windows Environments, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Spirent

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