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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

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

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: AWS EC2, cluster quorum, SIOS Datakeeper, SQL Server

Webinar: Disaster Recovery for SQL Server on Public Clouds

September 20, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Disaster Recovery for SQL Server on Public Clouds

Webinar: Disaster Recovery for SQL Server on Public Clouds

Register for the On-Demand Webinar

Running your SQL Server instances to any of the major public cloud platforms requires solid strategies for disaster recovery and high availability. Learn how to plan for disaster recovery and high availability and how to decide what’s best for your environment.

Register for the On-Demand Webinar

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: disaster recovery, SQL Server, Webinar

Webinar: Understanding the Availability Chain and its Impact on SQL Server

September 17, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Understanding the Availability Chain and its Impact on SQL Server

Webinar: Understanding the Availability Chain and its Impact on SQL Server

Register for the On-Demand Webinar

There are many factors to consider when evaluating the efficacy of your SQL Server availability. In this webinar, SIOS Technical Evangelist and Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVP, Dave Bermingham, outlines the key components that make access to your application possible. He discusses the chain of availability and how to determine your risk of downtime and failure for each link – and how to protect your most critical business applications.

Register for the On-Demand Webinar

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: availability chain, SQL Server, Webinar

Disaster: Live! SQL Server from Disaster to Operational

August 28, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Disaster Live! SQL Server from Disaster to Operational

Disaster: Live! SQL Server from Disaster to Operational

What happens in a SQL Server disaster? Here’s your chance to be part of the action.

This webinar guides you through a few simulated disasters of SQL Server. Walk away from this webinar with a DR plan and a checklist to ensure your business operations run as expected in the event of an outage.

Register here
Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Cloud, disaster recovery, SIOS Datakeeper, SQL Server, Windows Server

RTO vs. RPO: Learning the Difference to Achieve Your Operational Goals

October 10, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

RTO vs RPO Learning the Difference to Achieve Your Operational Goals

RTO vs. RPO: Learning the Difference to Achieve Your Operational Goals

In addition to 99.99% availability time, high availability environments also need to meet stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives, RTO and RPO, respectively. RTO and RPO are two key parameters that businesses should define before creating their business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Both metrics help to design the recovery process, and to define the recovery time limits, the frequency of backups, and the recovery procedures. Although RTO and RPO may seem alike, there are core differences you should consider. Read on to understand the difference between RTO vs. RPO.

To be clear, RTO is a measure of the time elapsed from application failure to restoration of application operation. It is a measure that dictates how much time you have to recover after disaster strikes. On the other hand, RPO is a measure of how up-to-date the data is when application availability has been restored after a downtime issue. It is often described as the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated when a failure happens.

Things to consider for evaluating your disaster recovery plan

First, it’s important to define the criticality of the application and its associated data to core business operations. How much does a minute of downtime or data loss for this application cost the company? Next, consider the potential set of disasters against which you would like to protect your organization. Some disasters that require data recovery and backup include:

  • Data loss: This may be as simple as someone deleting a folder, or as complex as a case of ransomware or an infected database.
  • Application loss: This refers to when changes to security, an update, or system configurations negatively impact services.
  • System loss: This includes when hardware fails, or, virtual server crashes.
  • Datacenter loss: This includes data centers that are on-premises and in public clouds
  • Business location loss: In this instance, a disaster might include an electrical outage, fire, flooding, or even a chemical spill outside the building. The business facilities require recovery to an alternate location.

Reducing an organization’s RPO and RTO

It’s important to consider the RTO and RPO as they apply to different types of data. Organizations that do a file-level backup of a database, rather than investing in an offsite virtual environment, will see longer recovery times and limits to how recently updated that data will be once recovered.

Consider the possible disasters, match them with the data sets that need to be protected, and then identify the recovery objectives. These steps will then provide you the information necessary to build tactical backup solutions that meet your recovery time objective and recovery point objective.

What is RTO and RPO in SQL Server?

SQL Server allows users to set up automated log backups to be restored from a standby server. With this log shipping, users can recover a fairly recent database copy—depending on the RTO and RPO of that process. Those RTO and RPO requirements are set by users, depending on their needs, budget, and any technological network limitations.

However, SQL Server RTO and RPO are not necessarily straightforward. In many cases, the process isn’t as fast as a client may imagine. They may have an ideal RPO in mind, but slow network speeds or an incorrectly configured backup can throttle this process. In addition, restoring a log backup in this way can involve transferring large amounts of data, and this process can easily exceed the determined acceptable RTO.

Since SQL Server is typically a business-critical application, customers can easily justify HA/DR protection for it – usually in the form of a failover cluster that can failover across cloud availability zones and regions for disaster recovery. This can be accomplished easily by adding SIOS DataKeeper to a Windows Server Failover Clustering environment or by using SIOS Protection Suite in a Linux environment. Both of these solutions will deliver not only 99.99% availability but also RPO of zero and RTO of mere seconds.

Now that you know…

Ultimately, data loss prevention for business continuity is a crucial requirement for any business. Take the time to consider how you will meet your RTO and RPO goals, no matter how large or small your business is, or what internal IT operations you support. SIOS high availability clusters deliver an RPO of zero and an RTO of mere minutes.

Learn more about SIOS DataKeeper for Windows or SIOS Protection Suite for Linux

To request a free trial, let us know here.

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: disaster recovery, RPO, RTO, SQL Server

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