SIOS SANless clusters - Page 67 of 188 - SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

June 9, 2020	Solution Brief: SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments Solution Brief: SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments SIOS SANless clusters are an easy, cost-efficient way to add disaster protection to your physical server-based cluster environment without the cost and complexity of an additional data center or disaster recovery site. Add a SIOS SANless cluster node in a cloud to your physical server-based cluster environment for efficient, real time, block level replication and disaster protection for your business critical applications. SIOS software enables failover of application instances across geographic locations and cloud availability zones or regions to provide site-wide, local, and regional disaster protection. SIOS SANless software lets you build a cluster using the local storage available to your physical, virtual, or cloud systems. SIOS software keeps local storage synchronized for high availability protection without the need for shared storage. Configuration flexibility Whether you want to protect applications in a physical server, a private cloud within your organization, in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, SIOS SANless software gives you the flexibility to build a fully automated, application-centric cluster and replication solution with your choice of industry standard hardware, replication schema, and deployment (active/active, active/passive). SIOS SANless clusters span environments letting you protect data with high availability and disaster recovery without the cost and complexity of a remote disaster recovery site. SIOS software lets you replicate between the configurations of your choice – between SAN and SANless environments and any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud configurations. No vendor lock in. No need for identical hardware at the source and destination. Easy to use. Easy to own You can build a SIOS SANless cluster and configure it in minutes using our intuitive interface. SIOS also makes monitoring and management of your clusters easy. The user-friendly management console lets you monitor the status of protected servers, communication paths, resources and applications at glance. Key Benefits Disaster Protection • Easy, cost efficient high availability and disaster protection for business critical applications Flexibility • Mix physical server and cloud environments for maximum efficiency. Ease of Use • Intuitive console for easy ongoing monitoring and management. Download Solution Brief on SANless Clusters for Hybrid Cloud Environments
	Solution Brief: SANless Cluster Solutions for Virtual Server Environments Solution Brief: SANless Cluster Solutions for Virtual Server Environments SIOS SANless software lets you build a cluster in a virtualized environment without the need for shared storage. You can use any local storage types available and provided by the hypervisor. SIOS software uses efficient block-level replication to keep local storage synchronized, enabling the standby servers in your cluster to continue to operate after a failover with access to the most recent data. Cluster virtual machines SIOS SANless software lets you create a cluster using virtual machines sitting on top of any hypervisor (VMware, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and others). It uses real-time replication to synchronize storage on the primary VM with storage on a standby VM located in the same data center, in your disaster recovery site, or both. In the event of a disaster, the standby VM can be brought into service immediately, eliminating the hours needed for restoration from back-up media. You simply access the replicated VMs in the DR site directly. Hyper-V host clustering that supports Live Migrations In Microsoft Hyper-V environments, SIOS SANless software allows you to cluster entire Hyper-V host machines at the hypervisor level for complete VM portability and failover protection. By keeping a real-time copy of the running VM synchronized on an alternate Hyper-V host, SIOS software allows you to easily failover or Live Migrate a VM from one Hyper-V host to another. You get complete portability to move individual VMs or all of the VMs on a host to another Hyper-V host in the cluster. Build a SIOS SANless cluster using virtual servers (A). In Microsoft Hyper-V environments (B), SIOS SANless clusters can be used at the virtual machine level for easy Live Migrations and complete server portability. Easy disaster recovery testing SIOS software also lets you restore replicated VMs to perform disaster recovery testing without disruption to the production site. When testing is complete, SIOS software eliminates changes that were made on the target server during the testing and resumes the replication from where it stopped. Download Solution Brief on SANless Cluster Solutions for Virtual Server Environments
May 17, 2020	Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments Solution Brief: High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments SIOS software provides a simple, cost-efficient way to provide high availability protection for SQL Server in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Add SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to a Windows Server Failover Clustering Environment such as SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) to create a cloud-friendly SANless cluster. Use AWS Quickstart deployment templates to create a SIOS SANless cluster in minutes. Fast, Cost-Efficient Way to Add High Availability Like all traditional failover clustering solutions, SQL Server FCI environments require the use of a shared storage. This requirement makes them impractical or impossible in public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services. SIOS SANless clustering software eliminates this requirement in an environment that is fully integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering. SIOS software adds the flexibility to protect your business critical applications such as SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition in Windows or Linux and any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Fast, Efficient Synchronization SIOS software uses highly efficient block-level replication to synchronize storage in all cluster nodes in realtime to create a SANless cluster. By replicating data volumes at the block level, SIOS software use significantly fewer system resources, makes more efficient use of the available bandwidth and transfers more data faster across than file-based replication alternatives. As a result, SIOS software delivers incredibly fast replication speeds—without hardware accelerators or compression devices. You get efficient storage without the cost or configuration limitations of a traditional SAN-based environment. Failover Across Availability Zones for Disaster Protection It keeps real-time copies of data synchronized across multiple nodes and across EC2 Availability Zones (AZs) for availability and disaster protection. High Availability with SQL Server Standard Edition SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software can be used with SQL Server Standard Edition FCI to create a cost-efficient high availability cluster without the need for more costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. Key Benefits Enables Clustering in the Cloud • Makes cluster failover protection in cloud environments possible by eliminating the need for shared storage. • Fully integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Protection for Applications and Data • High availability and disaster protection in a cloud environment. Ease of Use • AWS Quick Start deployment templates • Intuitive console for easy ongoing AWS monitoring and management. Download our Solution Brief High Availability for SQL Server in Amazon Cloud Environments
May 12, 2020	Case Study: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Hospital Ensures High Availability in the AWS Cloud with SIOS DataKeeper 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. Download the pdf
April 28, 2020	High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platforms High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platforms SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software. Over the span of many years, SAP had helped companies of all sizes and in all industries run efficiently and effectively. As a result of their hard work, they have built an ecosystem of enterprises heavily reliant on its platform. 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system. SAP application touches many critical parts of a company such as its’ ERP, manufacturing, business processes, customer service etc. It has become the lifeline of many enterprises that depends on it for their business to operate properly. As such, high-availability has became one of the top concerns of company managements when it comes to their SAP systems. In this article, we will discuss at a high-level what is HANA system replication and how it works. What are the limitations when it comes to high-availability, and how we can overcome them. We will also discuss about the options for HANA’s high-availability and the key differences. To select the right solution to use for HA, ask yourselves at the end of the day Meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) —– How long can SAP be down before you recover? Meet Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) —– How old can your data be when service is restored Meet Availability Service Level Agreements (SLA) —– How much uptime do you need? SAP HANA system replication SAP HANA System Replication is a reliable data protection and disaster recovery solution that provides continuous synchronization of a HANA database to a secondary location either in the same data center, remote site or in the cloud. System Replication is a standard SAP HANA feature that comes with the software. Using this feature, all data is replicated to the secondary site and data is pre-loaded into memory on the secondary site which helps to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO) significantly. So in case of a failover, the secondary site will be able to take over without even performing a HANA DB (re)start and will work as primary DB instantaneously upon failover. However, the failover has to be triggered manually by the admin using the sr_takeover command. For the replication to be reversed, or failback to primary, separate commands will need to be issued as well. Figure 1: HANA System Replication failover high-availability and DR Below are some key points of the HANA system replication method for HA and DR: Redundant Servers / Nodes In-memory database replicated by HANA system replication (in “log replay” mode) Multiple replication options: sync, sync-mem, async Supports active-active (read-only on secondary) Setup and admin through HANA cockpit, HANA studio or command line Limitations No monitoring of application process or replication failures and automated failover Failover, reverse replication and failback has to be performed manually – many manual steps are needed No virtual IP No integrated HA failover orchestration together with SAP ASCS etc. components As you can probably deduce from the above points by now, HANA system replication is designed to protect against data loss. Such that when an issue happens with the primary node, an admin can manually run a “sr_takeover” command, so that a problem with the primary system will not take down the entire SAP setup which depends on the HANA database for the prolonged period of downtime. However, a lot of this work has to happen manually and depends on human manual intervention, which although is good enough for DR, it does not make an ideal situation for HA (where downtime needs to be prevented). SIOS High Availability Clustering SIOS high availability software for SAP lets you protect SAP S/4HANA in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual, cloud (public, private, and hybrid) and high performance flash storage environments. SIOS software provides easy and flexible configuration, fast replication, and comprehensive monitoring and protection of the entire SAP S/4HANA environment. Specifically for SAP S/4HANA and the HANA database. SIOS can be used to complement what SAP is already doing with the HANA system replication. SIOS adds on to what SAP has to provide true high-availability – automated monitoring of key HANA application processes, and provide automated failover, failback, including virtual IP(s), even if you have multi-instance within a single HANA node. Figure 2: SIOS HANA System Replication failover high-availability and DR Below are some key points of the SIOS Protection Suite for SAP HANA HA and DR: Works in the cloud cross AZ and AR Provides automated failure detection and failover for key SAP HANA DB components: — SAP HANA Host Agent — SAP HANA sapstartsrv — SAP HANA Replication Enables automated SAP HANA replication takeover, switchback Automatically reverse replication Verifies and monitors that the HANA DB is running Provides Virtual IP “Full stack” failover orchestration with ASCS etc. SAP components Four steps to install and configure HA for HANA database We will not discuss the specific steps of how to configure SAP HANA, since there are already many on-line resources that cover those steps. But at a high-level, what you need to do are 4 basic steps: Install SAP HANA Configure HANA system Replication See – https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.02/en-US/676844172c2442f0bf6c8b080db05ae7.html Install SIOS protection suite See – http://docs.us.sios.com/spslinux/9.4.1/en/topic/sios-protection-suite-for-linux-installation-guide Use HANA recovery kit (wizard) in GUI to protect HANA See – http://docs.us.sios.com/spslinux/9.4.1/en/topic/sap-hana-recovery-kit The installation process flow are similar for other SAP components (ASCS, ERS, PAS, Web Dispatcher etc.) as well. With the HANA recovery kit included in the SIOS protection suite software, you can basically use a wizard in the SIOS Lifekeeper management GUI, to quickly protect a HANA database instance. You can also assign the virtual IP address for clients to connect to it, and manage the entire stack from it. Build a multi-instance environment and the solution will manage all the instances, virtual IPs etc. within the a fully integrated GUI, which makes it very easy to configure, manage the entire SAP landscape that is on SIOS HA. Figure 3: SIOS Lifekeeper Management GUI for SAP HANA ASCS and ERS Comprehensive HA/DR stack for SAP – Other than HANA database, SIOS Protection Suite also provides protection for key SAP services and supporting applications, all of which can be managed from the same GUI : Primary Application Server (PAS) ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS) SAP Central Services (SCS) Enqueue and message servers Enqueue Replication Server (ERS) Database (Oracle, Sybase, MaxDB, HANA, etc) Shared and/or Replicated File Systems Logical Volumes (LVM) NFS Mounts and Exports Virtual IPs Clustering in the cloud When moving SAP to the cloud, one of the key challenges is how to protect the SAP database, as well as the SAP applications stack in a SAP supported architecture. SIOS has been forefront of this move and are designed, certified and supported by SAP as well as all the major cloud providers. The diagram below is a high-level design of how a pair of S/4HANA system can be deployed across different availability zones, or even regions. In cloud environments, as the providers do have very low latencies between AZs, it is entirely possible to use synchronous replication across the AZs, thereby creating a pair of highly available S/4HANA system, not just for HA but also for DR at the same time. This is because AZs are geographically separate datacenters, much like how on-premise DR datacenters are, which highly redundant high-speed network connectivity between them. Figure 4: SIOS Protection Suite for SAP S/4HANA cloud architecture Why use SIOS over open-source HA for SAP? This question will invariably come up in people’s mind, since some Linux vendors already provide their HA extensions (HAE) or clustering, why would anyone want to use a commercial 3rd party HA solution like SIOS? Open-source HA is being offered as part of certain OS flavors “enterprise SAP” extensions subscription – it comes at a cost, it’s definitely not free, and not all Linux flavors are supported. SIOS supports all the major Linux flavors including Redhat, SUSE, Centos and Oracle Linux. For customers who want to run Windows for their ASCS or Content Server etc. SIOS also has Windows based solution with Windows clustering support, making it a one-stop-shop for the entire SAP landscape regardless of platform. Commercial HA support – OS vendors depend on open-source community for bug fixes, which can be a problem if the bug requires a longer time to get solved by a less active contributor. SIOS provides commercial support with dedicated support and development team just for its high-availability solution. It has immediate 24×7 support resolution, which would give customers much more confidence when there are issues that may develop. Complex setup and admin via command line is needed by open-source tools. They are made up of different components like Pacemaker, Corosync etc. maintained by different open-source initiatives. SIOS provides all-in-one GUI for wizards-based setup and admin. It allows one to deploy SAP HA in a matter of hours instead of weeks/months. SIOS provide pre-built application monitoring and failover orchestration for all SAP and cloud components requiring HA through a wizard in the GUI, as opposed to using HA extensions that still requires a lot of manual configuration. Automatically ensures SAP ERS is always running in opposite node of ASCS – SIOS provides the intelligence even in a multi-node ASCS setup, if a failover occured and ASCS failsover to the node with the running ERS, when the original ASCS node recovers, ERS gets automatically switched across so that the locks are always getting the redundancy needed. Opensource solution requires this to be done manually, hence impacts reliability and availability especially in times of multiple failures and recovery. SIOS reduces implementation/management time and costs, the lesser time you spend implementing and maintaining HA, the more time you will have for other more important tasks. Open-source use its STONITH mechanism which had been hardly reliable especially in cloud environments, SIOS provides multi-throng approach to prevent false failover and split-brain – quorum witness, multiple comm. path (heartbeat) which has been proven for over 20 years to be highly reliable in many scenarios. Summary SAP HANA system replication feature comes as part of the software and works well to protect the database from dataloss in case a problem arise from hardware or system failures. However if high-availability is the requirement, it would still need a 3rd party solution in order to get some of the automated monitoring, failover orchestration, virtual IP and so on. While there are opensource options in the form of enterprise Linux OS subscriptions for SAP, they certainly do not come free, and technical support is still limited as they purely relying on opensource community to maintain the Pacemaker, Corosync etc. projects. and to get support from contributors. There are also limitations in the native System Replication, opensource HAE which can be overcome by a commercial software solution vendor like SIOS. Hence, SIOS as a reliable 3rd party high-availability solution provider can help to ensure enterprise customers get the reliability and high-availability that they need in their mission critical SAP systems operations. For a peace of mind, SIOS proves to be a very viable complementary solution to SAP HANA system replication, which is also fully supported by SAP and all the major OS and platform vendors. Author: Jason Aw An IT professional who has been focused on high-availability and disaster recovery for over 20 years. Currently employed at SIOS Technology Corp. as Strategic Business Development for APAC.