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Hitachi Moves Leading Insurance Company’s Mission Critical System to Azure Ensuring High Availability

May 9, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Hitachi Moves Leading Insurance Company’s Mission Critical System to Azure Ensuring High Availability

SIOS DataKeeper chosen for its ability to enable data replication on Azure

A major insurance company wanted to migrate its mission-critical system called ‘channel system’ to the cloud. Channel system included both an in-house system, used by its employees and call centers, and a third-party system used by its sales agencies. The system is positioned as the core system of the company’s business – even a short system failure and downtime would impact the business largely.

The channel system operated in an on-premises, virtualized platform provided by Hitachi. However, the hardware was aging and support for the middleware was ending. This led the insurance company to launch a project to update the infrastructure and move the system to the public cloud to cut running costs. Hitachi took on the responsibility for configuring the system for this project.

The Environment

The channel system’s architecture mostly consisted of Windows software. “We decided to adopt Azure as the cloud platform as we could confirm that there was a high affinity between the system architecture and Microsoft Azure, and it would be the most cost-effective option. There were some things that cannot be changed, but we focused on placing first priority on the customer’s needs,” said Takuro Nishino, System Engineer at Hitachi.

The Challenge

One of the company’s requirements for the new infrastructure was to build a cluster configuration. Additionally, the database, which was built with a cluster configuration using DBMS, along with the job management middleware ‘JP1’ had to be configured in a cluster node in order to secure high availability (HA) even after the cloud migration. The existing system used WSFC (Windows Server Failover Clustering) to configure the HA cluster using Windows Server functions with a shared storage (SAN).

However, as of 2019, it was not possible to have a SAN-based configuration in Azure. Changing the HA software was considered as an option, but, “Considering the impact on the system, the priority was to move the system to the cloud while maintaining the application and infrastructure architecture as much as possible.” said Nishino. Hitachi decided to look for a solution that will both maintain the WSFC cluster configuration and replicate data without the SAN, while using the same HA software.

The Evaluation

After some research, Hitachi found SIOS DataKeeper, a data replication software that can build a cluster and integrate with WSFC on Azure. DataKeeper is an Azure-certified product, which enables you to synchronously replicate data from the active node to the standby node. By using DataKeeper with WSFC, the company would be able to make JP1 redundant. Hitachi also officially supported and had experience with this configuration. “DataKeeper was the only solution that made our project feasible – migrating to the cloud while maintaining the cluster configuration, without changing the HA software,” Nishino recalled.

Along with Hitachi, Hitachi Solutions, having a track record of implementing DataKeeper, took part in this project by creating detailed design documents and construction procedure manuals. The actual work of implementing DataKeeper was done by members of the Insurance company’s IT department.

The Solution

Hitachi Solutions created the basic designs and detailed designs after defining the requirements, and also provided templates to make it easier for the insurance company to implement the system. During this process, thanks to DataKeeper’s easy-to-understand features such as the parameter settings. Hitachi Solutions was able to create a procedure manual without any difficulty by simply customizing the default values to suit the customer environment. Hitachi Solutions also created a DataKeeper testing environment within its own local environment to identify any issues in advance – this process helped them create accurate procedure manuals and configure the production environment smoothly.

The Results

In October 2022, the insurance company’s system migration to Azure was completed. Since the migration, the HA cluster configuration – DataKeeper and WSFC – has been operating steadily. The company agrees that achieving an HA cluster configuration this way, without changing the system architecture or HA software, was the best way to migrate the system to Azure.

Hitachi and Hitachi Solutions were able to succeed in the insurance company’s cloud migration project by integrating DataKeeper within the HA cluster configuration. “The fact that we were able to introduce DataKeeper in our customer’s project was a great achievement. We’d like to apply our knowledge and achievements gained from this project in other Azure projects as well,” said Kenta Otsuka, Sales at Hitachi. “In fact, we have proposed DataKeeper to other clients who are also considering a migration of their systems to Azure. The experience of working with SIOS Technology through Hitachi Solutions and the skills and knowledge we gained will definitely contribute to our business in the future.”

“When the project began, Azure didn’t have a shared disk function, so DataKeeper was the only option. Even though SAN-based configuration is currently available in Azure, based on the fact that we were able to achieve a smooth migration and stable operation in this project by implementing DataKeeper, DataKeeper will continue to be a solution when redundancy is required in Azure migration and configuration projects,” said Satoshi Noguchi, System Engineer at Hitachi.

Download case study here

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Epicure Protects Business Critical SQL Server with Amazon EC2 and SIOS SANLess Clustering Software

January 13, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Epicure Protects Business Critical SQL Server with Amazon EC2 and SIOS SANLess Clustering Software

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition Software Provides High Availability and Disaster Protection.

Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants. The company relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Their public website provides company and product information, recipes, blogs, and enrollment information to its customers and to people interested in becoming a consultant. Their internal website provides consultants with important information about products and enables them to place all of their orders. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, Senior Network Infrastructure Administrator at Epicure.

The Environment

Both of Epicure’s websites run on a single server using two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition—one for each website. As the company expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and to ensure both of its business-critical websites would continue to operate in the event of failures or disasters. They decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and to use Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud for disaster recovery. “By bringing the sites in-house, we could ensure that our websites would deliver excellent user experiences for both our customers and consultants as our business continues to grow,” said Born.

The Challenge

As part of this website update process, Epicure IT staff 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 the more cost- effective Standard Edition,” Born said.

The Solution

Using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node SANLess cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the Epicure 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 Results

The SIOS software provided Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the cost and complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SAN storage or SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution that provides the cost savings of running on-premises and the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Because we know that if there is a website outage, it will failover automatically, our IT team can now focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

SIOS DataKeeper Clustering Software Enables Gulliver International to Move Internal IT Systems to Amazon Web Services Safely

January 10, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS DataKeeper Clustering Software Enables Gulliver International to Move Internal IT Systems to Amazon Web Services Safely

SIOS software provides high availability in AWS environments, enabling leading pre-owned vehicle company to move all IT system to the cloud.

Gulliver International is a leading pre-owned car company based in Tokyo with 420 locations throughout Japan. Over the next four years, the company plans to expand into a global business with 1600 stores worldwide. To ensure its IT infrastructure can accommodate this rapid growth, the company is migrating all of its internal systems to AWS and promoting a company-wide “cloud-first” policy for all new applications.

“Moving our systems to the cloud will give us flexibility and scalability we need to grow quickly and cost-efficiently, while continuously providing excellent service to our customers,” said Manabu Tsukishima, IT Manager, Gulliver International.

The Challenge

To ensure the success of their cloud-first initiative, Gulliver needed to protect their business critical applications from downtime in a cloud environment, where traditional failover clusters are not possible.

“We would not consider moving our applications to the cloud without an efficient, easy-to-implement high availability solution,” said Tsukishima. Gulliver chose to use SIOS DataKeeper software, which is sold in Japan by SIOS Technology, Inc.

The Solution

SIOS DataKeeper software enables Gulliver to use Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to build a failover cluster in a cloud environment, where traditional shared- storage clusters are not possible.

SIOS software uses efficient, real time replication to synchronize storage between servers operating as a WSFC cluster in an AWS environment.

Using SIOS software, Gulliver can configure two servers operating as a cluster across separate Amazon Availability Zones.

Just as in a traditional physical environment, if there is a failure on the primary server in the AWS cloud within one Availability Zone, WSFC moves the application to the second server located in another Amazon Availability Zone, providing full disaster tolerance and recovery in the cloud.

The Results

“We are extremely pleased with the value that SIOS DataKeeper software brings to our company’s cloud-first initiative,” said Tsukishima. With SIOS DataKeeper software, Gulliver can move to the cloud without adding complexity or disruption to existing operations.

“By enabling us to use a clustering configuration in the cloud in the same way we would in a physical environment, SIOS DataKeeper software made it possible for us to migrate to AWS without sacrificing application protection or changing the configuration of our existing system at all.”

About 30 percent of Gulliver’s existing on-premises systems have been migrated to AWS without any changes to the company’s system administration or added complexity.

As Gulliver continues to execute its expansion plan, it will soon need to protect even larger volumes of data and a wider range of applications. To meet thi s need, it will continue to use SIOS DataKeeper software as it migrates systems to the cloud. As a Standard Consulting Partner of APN (AWS Partner Network), SIOS is committed to continuing to provide high availability systems that operate on AWS.”

Reproduced with permission from SIOS