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Disaster Recovery Journal: SIOS DataKeeper SANLess Clustering Software is Now Microsoft Azure Certified and Available in the Azure Marketplace

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

SAN MATEO, Calif.  – 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.

View this article at DRJ.com

Top Hosting News: New Software on the Azure Marketplace Allows SAN-free Cloud Clustering

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SANLess clustering software developer SIOS Technology has put its SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software on the Azure Marketplace, providing enterprises an easy way to create a SANLess high availability cluster in Azure using Windows Server Failover Clustering.

The Azure Marketplace provides convenient access to SIOS DataKeeper, which enterprises can use to easily deploy applications such as SQL, SAP, and Oracle databases in Azure while maintaining high availability and protection.

SIOS was behind the first Linux clustering solution in the 90s. The company has since created a full Linux clustering offering called SIOS Protection Suite, and a product called SIOS DataKeeper for Windows which is essentially an add-on to Windows Server Failover Clustering. Applications depending on SAN-based Windows Server Failover Clusters for protection can be moved to Azure and achieve more comprehensive high availability.

According to Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology, SIOS software “eliminates the SAN in the cluster, and allow clusters to run in any variety of combinations.” Not having to rely on SAN technology, customers can use a variety of storage types such as high-speed direct attached storage in a physical environment, or cloud-based storage from providers like Azure and Amazon Web Services, and it all appears to applications as local storage. “We’re clusters anywhere and anyway,” he said.

Instead of having to buy and deploy expensive and complicated SAN equipment, SIOS provides an easy way for customers to create cloud storage clusters without leaving their desk. To deploy a SANless cluster, SIOS provides a step-by-step guide by Microsoft MVP David Bermingham.

Melnick said the solution is unique in the market that addresses a pain point for many enterprises running mission-critical applications that rely on transactional databases.

“We’re the only solution certified by Microsoft Windows for Azure to provide support for Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering to run in Azure,” he said. “And what that means is that customers who are accustomed to the high availability capabilities of Windows Server and have their critical applications running on those very popular failover clustering environments can now move those applications directly into Azure as-is. There’s really no change to the application needed – nothing but adding our software.”

SIOS customers can save a great deal of money by deploying clusters on externally hosted services which are often less expensive than local SANs. They can also ensure that data is secure by using VPN connections, and adding their own end-to-end encryption.

Melnick also mentioned that while most use cases up until this point have been enterprises, cloud and hosted service providers have been increasingly interested in SIOS’s SANless clustering capabilities.

“We’ve had probably more inquiries from service providers in the past six months than any time prior. Helping people move important workloads in the cloud is highly differentiating – and service providers are figuring that out. And service providers have their own value that they bring to the cloud ecosystem so we’re working with numbers of them now to put some solutions together.”

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

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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.

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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

April 14-15 2015: SIOS is Sponsoring and Attending POSSCON 2015

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SIOS is proud to sponsor Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON). If you’re in the area, I highly recommend joining this two day event. POSSCON brings a lineup of leading IT leaders to the Southeast for 3 days to discuss the latest issues for developers, executives, government leaders and educators. In addition to the educational value, this is also a fantastic place to network, learn and meet leading technology leaders and companies.

Stop by the SIOS booth to say hello,  learn about new job opportunities with SIOS, and take part in our SIOS iQ UI usability study. Study participants will receive a Starbucks gift card and be entered into our usability final prize draw for a chance to win something great!

Register Now

POSSCON 2015
April 14-15, 2015
Columbia, SC
Price: $109-$149 (Student pricing valid student ID: $29-$39)
Additional Informtion

VMblog.com: High Availability vSphere for SQL Server: 5 Things You Need to Know

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SQL Server administrators have many options for implementing high availability (HA) in a VMware environment. VMware offers vSphere HA. Microsoft offers Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). And SQL Server in WSFC has its own HA options with AlwaysOn Availability Groups and AlwaysOn Failover Clusters.

Third party vendors also provide solutions purpose-built for HA and disaster recovery, and these often integrate with other solutions to create even more options. For example, some solutions leverage the AlwaysOn Failover Cluster feature included with SQL Server to deliver robust HA and data protection for less than the cost of AlwaysOn Availability Groups that require the more expensive Enterprise Edition.

This article highlights five things every SQL Server administrator should know before formulating a high availability strategy for mission-critical applications in a vSphere environment. Such a strategy is likely to resemble the multi-site configuration shown in Figure 1, which is not possible with some HA options.

1. High-Availability Clusters for vSphere require Raw Disk Mapping

The layers of abstraction used in virtualized servers afford substantial flexibility, but such abstractions can cause problems when a virtual machine (VM) must interface with a physical device. This is the case for vSphere with Storage Area Networks (SANs).

To enable compatibility with certain SAN and other shared-storage features, such as I/O fencing and SCSI reservations, vSphere utilizes a technology called Raw Device Mapping (RDM) to create a direct link through the hypervisor between the VM and the external storage system. The requirement for using RDM with shared storage exists for any cluster, including a SQL Server Failover Cluster.

In a traditional cluster created with WSFC in vSphere, RDM must beused to provide virtual machines (VMs) direct access to the underlying storage (SAN). RDM is able to maintain 100 percent compatibility with all SAN commands, making virtualized storage access seamless to the operating system and applications which is an essential requirement of WSFC.

RDM can be made to work effectively, but achieving the desired result is not always easy, and may not even be possible. For example, RDM does not support disk partitions, so it is necessary to use “raw” or whole LUNs (logical unit numbers), and mapping is not available for direct-attached block storage and certain RAID devices.

2. Use of Raw Disk Mapping means Sacrificing Popular VMware Features

Another important aspect of being fully informed about RDM involves understanding the hurdles it can create for using other VMware features, many of which are popular with SQL Server administrators. When these hurdles are deemed unacceptable, as they often are, they eliminate Raw Device Mapping as an option for implementing high availability.

The underlying problem is how RDM interferes with VMware features that employ virtual machine disk (VMDK) files. For example, RDM prevents the use of VMware snapshots, and this in turn prevents the use of any feature that requires snapshots, such as Virtual Consolidated Backups (VCBs).

Raw Disk Mapping also complicates data mobility, which creates impediments to using the features that make server virtualization so beneficial, including converting VMs into templates to simplify deployment, and using vMotion to migrate VMs dynamically among hosts.

Another potential problem for transaction-intensive applications like SQL Server is the inability to utilize Flash Read Cache when RDM is configured.

3. Shared Storage can create a Single Point of Failure

The traditional need for clustered servers to have direct access to shared storage can create limitations for high availability and disaster recovery provisions, and these limitations can, in turn, create a barrier to migrating business-critical applications to vSphere.

In a traditional failover cluster, two or more physical servers (cluster nodes) are connected to a shared storage system. The application runs on one server, and in the event of a failure, clustering software, such as Windows Server Failover Clustering, moves the application to a standby node. Similar clustering is also possible with virtualized servers in a vSphere environment, but this requires a technology like Raw Disk Mapping so that the VMs can access the shared storage directly.

Whether the servers are physical or virtual, the use of shared storage can create a single point of failure. A SAN can have a high availability configuration, of course, but that increases its complexity and cost, and can adversely affect performance, especially for transaction-intensive applications like SQL Server.

4. HA vSphere Clusters can be built without Sacrificing VMware Functionality

Some third-party solutions are purpose-built to overcome the limitations associated with shared storage and the requirement to use RDM with SQL Server’s AlwaysOn Failover Clusters and Windows Server Failover Clusters.

Figure 1 – A multi-site high-availability configuration protects applications from outages that affect an entire data center.

The best of these solutions provide complete configuration flexibility, making it possible to create a SANLess cluster to meet a wide range of needs – from a two-node cluster in a single site, to a multinode cluster, to a cluster with nodes in different geographic locations for disaster protection as shown in Figure 1. Some of these solutions also make it possible to implement LAN/WAN-optimized, real-time block-level replication in either a synchronous or asynchronous manner. In effect, these solutions are capable of creating a RAID 1 mirror across the network, automatically changing the direction of the data replication (source and target) as needed after failover and failback.

Just as importantly, a SANLess cluster is often easier to implement and operate with both physical and virtual servers. For example, for solutions that are integrated with WSFC, administrators are able to configure high-availability clusters using a familiar feature in a way that avoids the use of shared storage as a potential single point of failure. Once configured, most solutions then automatically synchronize the local storage in two or more servers (in one or more data centers), making them appear to WSFC as if it was a shared storage device.

5. HA SANLess Clusters deliver Superior Capabilities and Performance

In addition to creating a single point of failure, replicating data on a SAN can significantly reduce throughput performance in VMware environments. Highly transactional applications like SQL Server are particularly vulnerable to these performance-related factors.

Figure 2 – Testing of SQL Server’s AlwaysOn Availability Groups and SIOS #SANLess clusters shows the throughput advantage possible with replication techniques purpose built for high availability and high performance.

Figure 2 summarizes test results that show the 60-70 percent performance penalty associated with using SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups to replicate data. These test results also show how a purpose-built high-availability SANLess cluster, which utilizes local storage, is able to perform nearly as well as configurations not protected with any data replication or mirroring.

The #SANLess cluster tested is able to achieve this impressive performance because its driver sits immediately below NTFS. As writes occur on the primary server, the driver writes one copy of the block to the local VMDK and another copy simultaneously across the network to the secondary server which has its own independent VMDK.

SANLess clusters have many other advantages, as well. For example, those that use block-level replication technology that is fully integrated with WSFC are able to protect the entire SQL Server instance, including the database, logons and agent jobs-all in an integrated fashion. Contrast this approach with AlwaysOn Availability Groups, which failover only user-defined databases, and require IT staff to manage other data objects for every cluster node separately and manually.

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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. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SIOS SAN and #SANLess cluster software (www.clustersyourway.com). 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.