SIOS SANLess Clustering Software Provides Epicure Selections With HA and DR

SIOS Technology Corp. announced that Epicure Selections is using its DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL server enterprise edition licenses.

Epicure, Canada’s direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants. It relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.

The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition, one for each website running on a single server.

“Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator at Epicure.

As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. As part of this update, Epicure wanted a way to provide HA and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition.

Using SANLess clustering software, Epicure’s IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SANLess clusters and configured them using the software GUI.

The SIOS software provides Epicure with a way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition 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 Born. “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.“

“Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within an organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, you need to protect applications, like Windows SQL Server, from downtime if the cloud instance or the cloud provider fails,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS. “Epicure is using SIOS to provide a fast, easy way to deploy applications in a HA environment in the cloud while continuing to use Windows Server Failover Clustering. I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.“