SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

Leading Beverage Manufacturer Protects Critical SAP ERP in AWS EC2 Cloud

by Leave a Comment

Leading Beverage Manufacturer Protects Critical SAP ERP in AWS EC2 Cloud

Leading Beverage Manufacturer Protects Critical SAP ERP in AWS EC2 Cloud

SIOS Chosen Based on Certifications and Validations for SAP, Amazon Web Services and Red Hat Linux

A leading Hong Kong-based beverage manufacturer produces 61 beverage brands including the number one software drink brand in the world and distributes them to more than 728 million customers throughout Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan and western USA.

The Environment

The company relies on an SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) system running in a Red Hat Linux environment to manage a variety of critical business operations. The SAP environment comprises a variety of services including the ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), SAP Central Services (ASCS), Evaluated Receipt Settlement, Web Dispatcher and the DB2 database. They used a large Storage Area Network (SAN) for data storage. The core SAP applications handle all business operations across the company’s beverage division. In their on-premises data center, the company provided uptime protection for this system using data replication and backups of the SAN.

The Challenge

The company’s IT department determined that they could achieve true high availability (99.99% uptime), disaster recovery, scalability and cost savings by migrating to the cloud and using failover clustering to protect their critical SAP system. However, they realized that SAN and other shared storage required for traditional failover clustering is not practical in some clouds and is not available in others.

The Evaluation

After extensive evaluation, the company chose to move their SAP environment to Amazon EC2. They established four key criteria for evaluating their choices for an HA/DR solution. Their solution needed to:

  • Be certified and validated for use with SAP, AWS and Red Hat
  • Provide both high availability and enable high performance
  • Protect against all likely failure scenarios
  • Enable easy ongoing operation and maintenance

The company’s cloud account manager recommended that they consider the SIOS Protection Suite, offered through AWS China. The SIOS software is certified by SAP for both NetWeaver and DB2, and that SIOS is fully tested and supported on Red Hat Enterprise and other distributions of Linux. The company tested the SIOS clustering software extensively under a variety of challenging failure scenarios, and also evaluated the throughput performance during periods of peak demand. The IT team’s confidence in SIOS Protection Suite increased as it passed each of their rigorous tests and proved to be remarkably easy to use.

The Solution

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux enables SANless failover clustering to provide full HA and DR for SAP and its critical services. The SIOS software uniquely includes modules called Application Recovery Kits (ARKs) that provide application-specific functionality that simplifies configuration and ensures failover orchestration maintains application best practices. The SAP and HANA ARKs automate configuration steps and validate configuration inputs and manage IP failover, and boot order to minimize human error. Unlike other clustering software that only validates server operability, the SIOS clustering software verifying that SAP and critical services are running, that databases are mounted and available, that any file shares or exports are available, and that clients are able to connect. To ensure these services are all functioning properly, SIOS software continuously monitors the servers, virtual machines, operating system and all major components of the SAP software. For DR protection, the company located the active and standby cluster nodes in different AWS Availability Zones for geographical separation.

The Results

SIOS Protection Suite has made it possible for this leading beverage manufacturer to meet the stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives established for its SAP/DB2 environment. To date, the configuration has experienced no perceptible downtime, including during planned maintenance. And these results have been realized with minimal effort, making it possible for the IT staff to focus more on projects that enhance employee productivity or otherwise improve business operations.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

SIOS LifeKeeper vs SUSE HAE

by Leave a Comment

Controlling Cloud Costs without Sacrificing Availability or Performance

SIOS LifeKeeper vs SUSE HAE

In many enterprises, SAP systems are so essential to the operation of core enterprise business operations that even brief periods of downtime can have devastating consequences. However, Linux-based solutions can be complicated and error-prone. Even SUSE HAE and other open source clustering options, are highly manual and only protect individual components. Read the white paper to learn the differences between SUSE HAE and SIOS Protection Suite and find out the fastest, most accurate way to manage and optimize Linux environments.

Download the white paper here

SIOS Delivers High Availability for Large Financial Services Firm

by Leave a Comment

SIOS Delivers High Availability for Large Financial Services Firm

SIOS Delivers High Availability for Large Financial Services Firm

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Delivers HA/DR for Critical Securities Applications on Oracle Databases

One of the oldest financial services firms in China provides securities and futures brokerage as well as investment banking, asset management, private equity, alternative investments, and financial leasing services. It is listed on both the Shanghai and the Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. The firm has 343 branches (including 302 securities branches and 41 futures branches) spanning 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in the Peoples Republic of China. They also operate across 14 countries including Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo and Singapore and have a stable customer base of approximately 18 million customers.

The Environment

The company relies on securities trading applications based on Oracle Database. running in a Red Hat Linux operating system environment. While the firm’s IT team was backing up these applications and database frequently, they could not recover operation quickly in the event of a failure or disaster.

The Challenge

The financial services firm wanted to implement high availability (99.99% uptime) and disaster recovery protection for their critical applications and the Oracle database they rely on.

The Evaluation

The firm’s IT team wanted a clustering solution that would ensure they could reliably meet their service level agreements (SLAs) for high availability as well as their stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO, RPO). It needed to be proven to provide HA in a Linux environment. They also wanted a solution that would reduce the complexity of clustering in an open-source environment.

The Solution

The firm created a two-node cluster on physical servers using SIOS Protection Suite for Linux clustering software. The SIOS clustering software monitors the entire application stack – network, storage, OS, and application. In the event of a failover, the software orchestrates the failover of application operation to the secondary node in the cluster. Application-aware modules in the SIOS Protection Suite
simplifies the complexity of configuring a cluster for Linux environments.

The Results

The firm has been using the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux clustering for many years and continually implements SIOS products in their environments. In that time, the firm has consistently met their availability SLAs. From its straightforward implementation to its reliable, easy-to-use management, the SIOS clustering software has met or exceeded their expectations.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS