Enterprises Adopt SIOS Technology SANLess Clustering Software on AWS

SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, announced that enterprise companies are turning to its SANLess clustering software, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, to provide HA and DR of critical data on business critical applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments.

Some of these enterprises include Gulliver International CO, Ltd, a Tokyo-based pre-owned car company; Epicure Selections, Canada’s direct sales company; and Spirent Communications, a global leader in communications test and measurement.

“Business critical applications require HA protection, regardless of where they are deployed,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS. “In the cloud, you need to protect applications from downtime just as you do in a physical server environment. However, traditional solutions, such as shared-storage clusters may not be practical or even possible in the cloud. With SIOS SANLess clustering software, enterprises are able to use traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide HA and DR protection for SQL Server and other enterprise applications in the cloud without the limitations of shared storage.“

Most cloud providers enable a measure of disaster protection by allowing enterprises to use multiple separate and redundant data centers or computing resources. However, they do not offer shared storage (i.e., a SAN), which is required to support traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for HA. SANless software can be added to a WSFC to create a HA cluster without the need for shared storage. With it, companies can run their business critical applications, such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel Gateway, and others, in a cloud environment without sacrificing HA protection.

Gulliver International
To accommodate growth, Gulliver has instituted a ‘cloud-first’ policy for all new applications and chose to move all of its internal IT systems to AWS. They are using WSFC and DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to build SANless, cloud-based clusters to provide HA protection for important applications. SANless clusters enable them to deploy their application in AWS in minutes and to manage their clusters without changes to their WSFC procedures.

“We would not consider moving our applications to the cloud without an efficient, easy-to-implement HA solution,” said Manabu Tsukishima, IT manager, Gulliver International.

Epicure Selections
Epicure Selections uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition, a public website that provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to its network of 16,000 consultants and an internal website that enables consultants to place product orders. Using DataKeeper clustering software they created a two-node cluster in a failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in their data center and the second node is in the Amazon cloud. SIOS software enables them to provide HA and DR protection using the cloud instead of needing to build out a remote DR location or to buy costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition application 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 Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator, Epicure. “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.“

Spirent Communications
Spirent decided to move its entire data center to the cloud. For this move to be successful, Spirent IT staff needed to provide HA for its Siebel Gateway Server and File Server application environments. Spirent chose DataKeeper Cluster Edition and built two-node clusters in the cloud using standard WSFC and adding DataKeeper Cluster Edition software as an ingredient. The SIOS software uses real-time replication to synchronize storage between instances in different Availability Zones, making them appear to WSFC as a SAN. The solution was fast and easy to deploy, allowing them to protect their business’ most important applications and to move to a cloud-first data center.

“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 Sohamn Chatterjee, senior business systems architect, Spirent. “The SIOS software enabled us to implement our move to the cloud efficiently.“