Case Study: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Hospital Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

May 12, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Case Study: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Hospital Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

SIOS Chosen for its Ability to Deliver both High Availability and High Performance

Chris O’Brien Lifehouse (www.mylifehouse.org.au) is an integrated and focused center of excellence specializing in state-of-the-art treatment and research for patients who are suffering from rare and complex cancer cases. Lifehouse offers everything a cancer patient might need in one place, including advanced oncology-surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, clinical trials, research, education, complementary therapies and psychosocial support. Situated alongside Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the University of Sydney in Camperdown, the not-for-profit hospital sees more than 40,000 patients annually for screening, diagnosis and treatment. As one of Australia’s largest clinical trial centers, Lifehouse also provides its patients access to the world’s latest cancer treatment breakthroughs.

The Environment

Lifehouse uses the MEDITECH healthcare Electronic Medical Record and patient administration system, which stores the electronic health records for all patients in a database.

“The health information system and database are vital to the care we provide, and if either goes down, patient records would not be accessible, and that would paralyze the hospital’s operations,” explains Peter Singer, Director Information Technology at Lifehouse.

In the hospital’s datacenter, mission-critical uptime has been provided by Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) running on a Storage Area Network (SAN). But like many organizations, Lifehouse wanted to migrate to the cloud to take advantage of its superior agility and affordability.

The Challenge

Lifehouse chose Amazon Web Services as its cloud service provider, and had hoped to “lift and shift” its environment directly to the AWS cloud. To simulate its on-premises configuration, Peter chose a “cloud volumes” service available in the AWS Marketplace. Failover clusters were configured using software defined storage volumes to share data between active and standby instances, and testing proved that the approach could provide the automatic failover needed to satisfy the hospital’s demanding recovery point and recovery time objectives.

There was a problem, however: The use of software-defined cloud volumes had a substantial adverse impact on throughput performance. With so many elements and layers involved, performance problems are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot in software defined configurations deployed in the cloud. With the “No Protection” option specified, the cloud volumes performed well. But “No Protection” was not really an option for the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper

“We were able to go from testing to production in a matter of days. Ongoing maintenance is also quite simple, which we expect will minimize our operational expenditures associated with high availability and disaster recovery,” said Peter who is responsible for mission-critical MEDITECH application and its database. “We made every reasonable effort to find and fix the root cause, and eventually concluded that software-defined storage would never be able to deliver the throughput performance we needed,” Peter recalls. So the team at Lifehouse began looking for another solution.

The Evaluation

In its search for another solution capable of providing both high availability and high performance, Lifehouse established three criteria:

Validation for use in the AWS cloud
Ability to work across multiple Availability Zones
Performance that was as good as or better than what had been achieved on-premises
Security / Privacy with support for encryption in motion and at rest

Validation was important to minimize risk associated with using a third-party solution in the cloud. The ability to work across multiple Availability Zones would assure business continuity in the event an entire AWS datacenter was impacted by a localized disaster. The sub-millisecond latency AWS delivers between Availability Zones would be critical to being able to replicate data synchronously to “hot” standby instances to meet the hospital’s demanding recovery time and recovery point objectives.

After conducting an exhaustive search, Peter concluded that the best available solution was SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition from SIOS Technology. SIOS DataKeeper was available on the AWS Marketplace, which assured it was proven to operate reliably in the AWS cloud. And because it did not use software-defined storage, Peter was confident SIOS DataKeeper would be able to deliver the performance Lifehouse needed.

The Solution

SIOS DataKeeper provides the high-performance, synchronous data replication Lifehouse needs. By using real-time, block-level data mirroring between the local storage attached to all active and standby instances, the solution overcomes the problems caused by the lack of a SAN in the cloud, including the poor performance that often plagues software-defined storage. The resulting SANless cluster is compatible with Windows Server Failover Clustering, provides continuous monitoring for detecting failures at the application and database levels, and offers configurable policies for failover and failback.

Lifehouse currently has eight instances in SANless failover clusters to support its MEDITECH application and database across different AWS availability zones to protect against widespread disasters. The latency inherent across the long distances involved normally requires the use of asynchronous data replication to avoid delaying commits to the active instance of the database. But the real-time, block level data mirroring technology used in SIOS DataKeeper still enables Peter Singer to achieve a near-zero recovery point.

The Results

Unlike software-defined shared storage, SIOS DataKeeper is purpose-built for high performance high availability, so it came as no surprise to Peter Singer that the cloudbased configuration now works as needed. What was a bit surprising was just how easy the solution has been to implement and operate: “We were able to go from testing to production in a matter of days. Ongoing maintenance is also quite simple, which we expect will minimize our operational expenditures associated with high availability and disaster recovery.”

SIOS DataKeeper has enabled Lifehouse to take full advantage of the economies of scale afforded in the cloud without sacrificing uptime or performance. “If it were not for SIOS, we might not have been able to migrate our environment to the cloud,” Peter Singer concluded.

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Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure

April 26, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure: To Build a “System That Never Stops” With Replication

“”We got several proposals for both on-premises and cloud, and decided to migrate to Microsoft Azure with Fujitsu’s proposal of SIOS DataKeeper – that best fits our requirements,” said Akihiko Kobayashi, a System Representative.

Toyo Gosei is a long-established chemical manufacturer that has been operating business for 65 years. The company’s main product, photosensitive materials for photoresist, is an indispensable material for manufacturing liquid crystal displays and semiconductor integrated circuits. The company is also focusing on technological development for the most advanced photosensitive materials.

In 2007, the company was required to select the successor system of GLOVIA/Process C1, which had been used as a core business system. While receiving proposals from several companies, they chose to introduce “SAP,” an ERP system of German company SAP because of its solid J-SOX support. Time passed and around 2015, the servers installed when introducing SAP had come to the end of maintenance.

IT Infrastructure

The company’s IT infrastructure is an on-premises VMware-based data center and a remote data center for business continuity/disaster protection. Since most of their applications run on the Microsoft Windows operating system, they used guest-level Windows Server failover clustering in their VMware environment to provide high availability and disaster protection.

The Challenge – Migrating to Azure

Behind the migration to cloud, there were needs to be free from on-premises system maintenance, demands for flexibility of scale-up and preparing for disaster based on the experience during the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Their decision to go to cloud was driven by the fact that the servers in their premises physically moved during the earthquake and it almost led to a failure.

When migrating to Azure, the company built a backup system to address system failures and in case of disasters. “SAP has all the data necessary for our business. If SAP stops, the production process also stops. If the outage continues for two or three days, shipment, payment and billing is also stopped. The SAP system cannot be stopped,” said Kobayashi.

The first step was to set up a SAP backup system on Azure to take a daily backup of the production system in the East Japan region of Azure and a weekly backup of the standby system in the West Japan region.

Implementation

“However, backup is just a backup. Basically we need to make production system redundant in order to prevent it from stopping. On AWS, which was used for information systems, shared disks were available with a redundant configuration. However, Azure does not support shared disks. For this reason, we decided to use DataKeeper of SIOS Technology that enables data replication on Azure,” said Kobayashi.

They created a cluster configuration between storage systems connected to the redundant SAP production system and replicate the data using DataKeeper to make it consistent. This provides the same availability as when using shared disks even on Azure where shared disk configuration is not supported.

“We have been in stable operations after the initial stage where a failover occurred,” said Kobayashi. “Regarding SIOS DataKeeper, the only thing we have to do is renew the maintenance contract.”

The Results

As a mid-term plan in the future, they need to prepare for the “SAP 2025 problem” where support for the current SAP version will expire. They have not built a specific plan, but Kobayashi said, “when moving to the new architecture S/4HANA and if clustering is required, we will implement SIOS DataKeeper because we trust it.“

SIOS DataKeeper is a reliable partner for Kobayashi. “Because you cannot stop the production system, it is IT personnel’s responsibility to choose a reliable tool,” he said.

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SIOS DataKeeper Chosen For Ability To Enable Shared Storage Clustering In Azure

January 27, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

RSM Australia Gets Protection in a Hybrid Cloud

SIOS DataKeeper chosen for its ability to enable shared storage clustering in Azure

“With any clustering technology, you need to be wary of what you’re doing to avoid having failover fail. But with SIOS DataKeeper, the system pretty much just manages and maintains itself…It just works!” – Craig Hannagan, RSM Project Manager

RSM Australia (www.rsm.global/australia) is a professional services firm with advisers in 30 offices across Australia. RSM Australia is part of RSM Global, the world’s sixth-largest audit, tax and consulting network. RSM Global nexus of member firms draws on more than 43,000 people in 800 offices across 120 countries to help guide clients through business challenges, both locally and seamlessly across borders.

The Environment

For years RSM Global had a collection of independent content management systems running across their 30 national offices. Craig Hannagan, RSM’s Project Manager was tasked with creating a single, centralized CMS that was highly available for over 1,200 users. After deciding on using iManage’s CMS product, they had to determine the best way to maximize availability.

The Challenge: Achieving Uptime On Azure

Having a highly available system was critical. “We could have hosted this centralized solution on-premises but as an existing Microsoft customer and given the inherent high availability of Azure, the public cloud was quite an attractive option for us,” Craig recalls. “We already had a Telstra MPLS network connecting all of our offices. So providing access into Azure was quite easy.”

After some initial research, however, the team discovered that Microsoft Azure could not achieve the uptime required without additional support. Specifically, the clustering on the Azure cloud did not support the disk sharing required to deploy SQL Server Standard Edition. “We could have used the Enterprise Edition to achieve always-on availability, but we didn’t want to just replicate databases. We wanted to actually replicate the entire instance of SQL Server to assure having an instant, seamless failover,” Craig explains.

The Evaluation

While searching the Internet for possible solutions, Craig and his team learned about Providence Solutions Australia (www.providencesolutions.com.au), uptime specialists with Asia Pacific reach. The team at Providence Solutions Australia recommended using SIOS DataKeeper. In addition to meeting all of the technical requirements, Craig was also impressed that SIOS DataKeeper was certified by Microsoft. “These two factors gave us confidence that we were not going to encounter conflicts between the two vendors.

The Solution For Azure High Availability & Disaster Recovery

RSM Australia is using SIOS DataKeeper to address the inability of Azure to use cluster-aware shared storage, such as a storage area network. To maximize high availability, the company deployed a third node on-premises in Sydney that serves as both a disaster recovery solution in the event of a total Azure failure and an “exit strategy” should they ever decide to leave Azure in the future. On-premises replication also facilitates unlocking the disc volumes to make periodic backups onto tape for permanent records retention.

According to Craig: “One thing we’ve found with Azure is while they offer various backup technologies within the cloud, if you want to leave for whatever reason, getting a copy of that backup can be fairly difficult. The fact that we’re able to get backups on our own tape media is a real bonus.”

The Results

“When it comes to the potential for a longer-term outage, such as a damaging storm, a terrorist attack, a fire, an earthquake, or even vandalism, Azure’s High Availability solution is not going to be able to cover us. Having that on-premises Disaster Recovery solution using SIOS DataKeeper enables us to initiate a disaster recovery at the push of a button,” says Craig. “And we can test our Disaster Recovery configuration whenever we want to make sure it will work if and when we ever need it.”

Craig and his team are completely satisfied with the reliability of SIOS DataKeeper: “With any clustering technology, you need to be wary of what you’re doing to avoid having failover fail. But with SIOS DataKeeper, the system pretty much just manages and maintains itself. During actual instances when Azure went down briefly causing the disks to get out of sync, the SIOS solution was able to self-heal. We do check on it every so often, of course, just to be 100 percent sure but, we don’t need to do anything on a day to day basis. It just works!”

Craig also appreciates the support he has received from Providence Solutions Australia noting, “We’ve only had to create a few trouble tickets, and they were all more about questions than actual problems. But the Providence team was there for us every time.”

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Perth’s Optus Stadium gets SIOS DataKeeper with Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering for Hyper-V high availability

January 26, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Meet Australia’s smartest and highest tech stadium – Perth’s Optus Stadium

SIOS DataKeeper™ implemented with Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering for Hyper-V high availability

SIOS DataKeeper was determined to be the only way to ensure a simple, manageable and yet cost-effective and robust solution that supported multiple integrations of devices and data securely, while also guaranteeing a high availability outcome.

The Perth Stadium, also known as Optus Stadium, is a high tech, multi-purpose stadium in Perth, Western Australia. Completed in late 2017 and officially opened in January 2018, the stadium has a capacity of over 60,000 people, making it the third-largest stadium in Australia after the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Stadium Australia. It has also been named Australia’s smartest and highest tech stadium.

According to Sascha Rhalf, Commercial Project Manager, Siemens, the Stadium is a landmark project in Western Australia that shapes the city’s skyline. It’s a high profile infrastructure development project that has been in the publics’ eye from the start due to the significant amount of government funding that the project has received.

The project itself has been a marvel, particularly for the Construction, Building Management and IT industries, given the complexity of both the building construction and IT architecture of the Stadium. Providence Solutions Australia along with Siemens and BGIS, joined forces to form a power-house team to work through the complex nature of the project and deliver one of Australia’s best Stadiums built to-date. Now nearing the end of its first year of operations, we discuss in more detail the background behind the project and the journey thus far.

The Challenge: Maintaining Availability

The highly customized-design of the Stadium made this a challenging project from the beginning. It was also a greenfield project, meaning there were no blueprints or previous examples/use cases to follow or reference. In fact, the blueprint for future similar projects was created during the project itself.

The project demanded a fit-for-purpose and tailored IT management solution that would meet all of the Stadium’s customized needs now, and into the future. The complexities of the IT design requirements ranged from high megapixel cameras, mission-critical application servers, a large number of multi-vendor integrations and dependencies, event day service delivery, and diverse vendors and ICT (Information Communications Technology) requirements. At the same time, it was important to keep to budget and timelines, as well as ensure the highest level of quality and security.

Complexity also stemmed from the fact that the very latest technologies were implemented to support the project’s future requirements. From face recognition to highly sophisticated access systems, to thousands of sensors – high tech and future-proofing technology was selected to ensure that the Stadium was equipped for the future. This meant, however, that the amount of data to be captured and stored on-site would be significant requiring a powerful solution to house and store the data securely.

The performance requirements for the technology implemented at the Stadium also gave complexity to the project. For example, the performance requirements for security video cameras alone was extraordinary. There are around 700 cameras including a significant number of ultra-high-definition cameras. The CCTV management solution is provisioned with 1Pb of scalable tiered storage for review, analytics, facial recognition and database matching.

There were also varied levels of availability requirements ranging from 99.999% (5 9’s) to 99.9% which is considered unique. It was critical to ensure that there was uninterrupted processing of data and application availability, eliminate any loss of data and transactions if a server fails, and continuous computing during repair.

The Solution for High Availability for Hyper-V Virtual Machines

Providence Solutions Australia was selected as an instrumental technology partner involved in the end-to-end solution design and build. From design to engineering, to building and implementing, they were the “brains” behind the Optus Stadium’s unified compute IT platform.

The Optus Stadium is the first-ever stadium in Australia to embrace a unified, continuous computing infrastructure platform which was highly essential given the complex nature of the project from both a building and IT perspective.

The unified continuous computing infrastructure platform is a single platform that can house multiple applications and data and features built-in resilience through fault tolerance, high availability, high performance and seamless disaster recovery capabilities. Put simply, it is a super platform – one that can cope with anything.

It was decided that a hyper-converged unified compute platform was key to the overall technology and IT build given the range of diverse systems and applications managed. Providence Solutions Australia implemented SIOS DataKeeper™ with Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide high availability for their Hyper-V virtual machines. It was determined that this was the only way to ensure that there was a simple, manageable and yet cost-effective and robust solution that supported multiple integrations of devices and data securely, while also guaranteeing a high availability outcome.

The super platform and total building solution work by providing an end-to-end solution for the stadium operations. In a single platform, it contains a convergence of multiple systems, spanning video surveillance management, recording and archival, voice, data, storage, industrial monitoring (SCADA systems), HVAC, building and power management, security systems, video intercoms, irrigation, billboards, lifts, and lighting control.

There is a range of 3^rd party vendor applications that sit on the integrated platform including Johnson Control, Philips Dynalite, and Schindler.

The Results

The Stadium has delivered. There has been positive feedback from the public and visitors since the opening. It is a state of the art stadium as well as a workplace with transparent and intelligent security on a future proof backbone with superior analytics.

It has been built with IT security top of mind and has been built meeting all the technical specifications and performance requirements set out by Multiplex. The IT architecture and design has also taken future developments into consideration.

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SIOS Software Delivers High Availability Data Protection

March 12, 2019 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS Software Delivers High Availability Data Protection in a User-Friendly Cloud Environment

Bonfiglioli is a leading Italian design, manufacturing and distribution company that specializes in industrial automation, mobile machinery and wind energy products. With more than 3,600 employees in locations around the world, the company relies on its IT infrastructure and applications such as its business critical SAP-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application to keep business operations running smoothly.

They chose to use SIOS DataKeeper to overcome barriers to moving business-critical SAP ERP system to cloud.

The Challenge

This forward-looking company’s IT team implemented a program to move part of their IT operations into the Microsoft Azure cloud in a methodical, phased approach. Another key aspect was to leverage Azure as a Disaster Recovery site. A key component of their migration planning was ensuring that they could still meet strict SLAs for application performance and enjoy High Availability Data Protection in the cloud.

Operations in their on-premises environment were protected by VMware clustering that allows Windows Server Failover Clustering to manage a failover of operations to a secondary server in the event of an infrastructure fault or failure. Providing this type of protection in the cloud posed a challenge because guest-clustering with shared-bus disks is not a viable solution in a public cloud.

The Evaluation

Bonfiglioli considered a variety of options to protect their sensitive, business-critical SAP ERP system. They turned to their partner BGP Management Consulting for advice. Based on their extensive experience in helping companies like Bonfiglioli provide high availability protection for important application in the cloud, BGP recommended using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition. The SIOS DataKeeper software had several key advantages. First, SIOS DataKeeper is the only certified high availability clustering solution for SAP in a public cloud. Second, BGP had firsthand experience with SIOS DataKeeper. They knew that it was very simple to install, transparent to the OS, and a proven, highly effective solution.

The Solution

Creating a cluster in VMware using Raw Device Mapping and shared-bus disks (RDM) is challenging and creates limitations for backing up the VMs. SIOS DataKeeper removed these barriers by enabling Bonfiglioli to create a cluster environment without the need for RDM. They simply created a two-node cluster in VMware. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition added to synchronize storage in each cluster instance. The synchronized storage appears to WSFC as a single shared storage disk in their on-premises environment. The SIOS DataKeeper software also provides high availability data protection for their SAP Central Services Instance. As well as eliminates a single point of failure risk of the SAP Netweaver architecture. SIOS DataKeeper replicates an SSD-tiered disk partition in the company’s on-premises data center. Thereby allowing Bonfiglioli to restore their VMs on Microsoft Azure in the event of a disaster

The Results

Daniele Bovina, Systems Architect, Bonfiglioli said that SIOS DataKeeper product is SAP certified. Best of all, it is rock-solid and very transparent to the OS. This allows them to take advantage of all the simplicity and benefits of a Windows Server Failover Cluster. And as well as the cost-efficiencies and flexibility of the Microsoft Azure cloud.

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To read about how SIOS helped Bonfiglioli achieve High Availability Data Protection, go here