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October 25, 2021	High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know While researching reasons to migrate to the cloud, you’ve probably learned that the benefits of cloud computing include scalability, reliability, availability, and more. But what, exactly, do those terms mean? Let’s consider high availability (HA), as it is often the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud for many companies. The idea is to make your products, services, and tools accessible to your customers and employees at any time from anywhere using any device with an internet connection. That means ensuring your critical applications are operational – even through hardware failures, software issues, human errors, and sitewide disasters – at least 99.99% of the time (that’s the definition of high availability). While public cloud providers typically guarantee some level of availability in their service level agreements, those SLAs only apply to the cloud hardware. There are many reasons for application downtime that aren’t covered by SLAs. For this reason, you need to protect these applications with clustering software that will detect issues and reliably move operations to a standby server if necessary. As you plan what and how you will make solutions available in the cloud, remember that it is important that your products and services and cloud infrastructure are scalable, reliable, and available when and where they are needed. Quick Stats on High Availability in the Cloud in 2021 Now that we’ve defined availability in the cloud context, let’s look at its impact on organizations and businesses. PSA, these statistics may shock you, but don’t fret. We’ve also got some solutions to these pressing and costly issues. As much as 80% of Enterprise IT will move to the cloud by 2025 (Oracle). The average cost of IT downtime is between $5,600 and $11,600 per minute (Gartner; Comparitech). Average IT staffing to employee ratio is 1:27 (Ecityworks). 22% of downtime is the result of human error (Cloudscene). In 2020, 54% of enterprises’ cloud-based applications moved from an on-premises environment to the cloud, while 46% were purpose-built for the cloud (Forbes). 1 in 5 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan (HBJ). 70% of companies have suffered a public cloud data breach in the past year (HIPAA). 48% of businesses store classified information on the cloud (Panda Security). 96% of businesses experienced an outage in a 3-year period (Comparitech). 45% of companies reported downtime from hardware failure (PhoenixNAP). What You Can Do – Stay Informed If you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, join us. The SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium is taking place Wednesday, September 22nd (EMEA) and Thursday, September 23rd (US) in a global virtual conference format for IT professionals focusing on the availability needs of the enterprise IT customer. This event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future. Cloud Symposium Speakers & Sessions Posted We have selected speakers presenting a wide range of sessions supporting availability for multiple areas of the data application stack. Check out the sessions posted and check back for additional presentations to be announced! Learn more Register Now Whether you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, this event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future. Register now for the SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium. Reproduced from SIOS
October 22, 2021	Disaster Recovery Made Simple Disaster Recovery Made Simple Disaster Recovery Made Simple Heard the term disaster recovery (DR) thrown around often? DR is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools. It ensures critical IT systems, databases, and applications continue to operate and be available to users when a man-made or natural disaster happens. It typically involves moving application operation to a redundant DR environment that is geographically separated from the primary environment. While the IT team owns the disaster recovery strategy, DR is an important component of every organization’s Business Continuity Plan. The latter is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools to ensure business operations continue through an interruption in service. It may sound confusing at first. But we’ve collected some quick facts to make disaster recovery simple to understand: Point 1. Implement an IT disaster recovery or a disaster recovery plan (DRP) A DRP is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools that ensure critical IT systems, databases, and applications continue to operate and be available to users when a disaster strikes the organization’s primary computing environment. While the IT team owns the disaster recovery strategy, DR is an important component of every organization’s Business Continuity Plan. Point 2. Ensure Geographic Separation An essential part of application disaster recovery is ensuring there is a redundant, geographically separated application environment available. You have either efficient, block level replication and or a clustering software that can failover operation to it in the event of a disaster. If your application is running in a cloud, your clustering environment should failover across cloud regions and availability zones for disaster recovery. Point 3. Test, test, and test some more In a recent Spiceworks survey, 59 percent of organizations indicated they had experienced one to three outages (that is, any interruption to normal levels of IT-related service) over the course of one year. 11 percent have experienced four to six. 7 percent have experienced seven or more. In short, a DR event is nearly inevitable. Be sure you conduct regular testing to ensure you know exactly what will happen when it does. Point 4. Understand Your Risk The disaster in DR does not need to be a full-fledged hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake that impacts your business. Disasters come in many forms, including a cyber-attack, fire, theft, or vandalism. In fact, simple human error still rates among the leading causes of IT data center downtime. In short, a disaster is any crisis that results in a down system for a long duration and/or major data loss on a large scale that impacts your IT infrastructure, data center, and your business. Point 5. Ensure Your DRP has a Checklist It should include critical IT systems and network prioritized by their expected time for recovery (RTO). Document the steps needed to restart, reconfigure and recover systems and networks. Employees should know where to locate the DRP and how to execute basic emergency steps in the event of an unforeseen incident. Point 6. Substantiate DRPs through testing DRPs should identify deficiencies and provides opportunities to fix problems before a disaster occurs. Testing can offer proof that the plan is effective and that it will enable you to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs). Since IT systems and technologies are constantly changing, DR testing also helps ensure a disaster recovery plan is up to date. Choose a failover clustering technology that makes DR testing simple by facilitating fast, simple, reliable switchover of application operation to DR nodes and back. When you look at those statistics, you know you are living on borrowed time if you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place. The SIOS disaster recovery solution is a multi-site, geographically dispersed cluster that meets RPO and RTOs with ease. What makes SIOS different from many other DR providers is that it offers one solution that meets both high availability and disaster recovery needs. To learn more about our DR solutions, check out the insights page here. Reproduced with permission from SIOS
October 16, 2021	Enhanced High Availability for SAP S/4HANA in Cloud Environments SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Now Features Enhanced High Availability for SAP S/4HANA in Cloud Environments SIOS is pleased to announce the GA release of SIOS Protection Suite for Linux version 9.5.2 clustering software. Our latest release features enhanced automation and application failover orchestration that makes creating and managing high availability (HA) clusters in complex SAP S/4HANA environments easier and more reliable for enterprises. New features and capabilities in SIOS Protection Suite for Linux 9.5.2, include: Enhanced, comprehensive Support for high availability in Google Cloud Platform with the addition of SIOS Internal Load Balancer tool designed to orchestrate efficient IP management during switchovers and failovers. Enhanced ability to automate interactions with SIOS LifeKeeper with products such as Ansible. Near-Zero Downtime for Switchover During Planned Maintenance. Supports a HANA “Takeover with Handshake” eliminating the potentially time-consuming process of shutting down the primary HANA server database for switchover, allowing to perform planned maintenance without disrupting ongoing service to end-users. Empowering customers by making SAP logging easier to use and take action on. Schedule a personalized demonstration here. Reproduced from SIOS
October 10, 2021	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
October 5, 2021	SIOS Announces New Version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suite for Windows SIOS Announces New Version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suits for Windows Enhanced HA Clustering for Business Critical Applications on AWS SIOS is pleased to announce version 8.8 of SIOS Protection Suite for Windows – with innovations designed to make HA clustering in the cloud faster and easier. SIOS Protection Suite for Windows includes SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition for efficient host-based, block level replication, SIOS LifeKeeper for application monitoring and failover orchestration, and a variety of application recovery kits for advanced, application-specific intelligence. SIOS DataKeeper can also be used independently to add efficient replication to Windows Server Failover Clustering environments for SANless clustering in the cloud. Improved High Availability for Business Critical Applications on AWS In version 8.8, SIOS has added several enhancements to SIOS Protection Suite to make creating and managing clusters in public clouds easy and error free. New features include: Application Recovery Kit (ARK) support of AWS Route 53 DNS Service and EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud services Integration with these AWS services provides faster and more efficient recovery and access to protected applications after a switchover to a backup server in another AWS Region or Availability Zone. SIOS ARKs automate the interaction with cloud services, reducing manual tasks and ensuring configuration accuracy Streamlined failover of servers in Azure Cloud using the Internal Load Balancer (ILB) These new features give enterprises additional confidence that the high availability they have always trusted from SIOS can be achieved in the public cloud, keeping applications and data safe and reducing downtime. Reproduced from SIOS

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