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White Paper: SQL Server HA and DR: A Simple Strategy for Realizing Dramatic Cost Savings

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SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery A Simple Strategy for Realizing Dramatic Cost Savings

White Paper: SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery: A Simple Strategy for Realizing Dramatic Cost Savings

Simple SQL Savings in HA
White Paper: SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery: A Simple Strategy for Realizing Dramatic Cost Savings

              As companies become increasingly reliant on SQL Server to run their critical business operations, their tolerance for application downtime soon approaches zero. However, with the licensing changes that were introduced in SQL Server 2012 and the rising TCO of SAN-based clusters, the cost of providing high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protection has risen sharply.

Download White Paper: SQL Server HA and DR: A Simple Strategy for Realizing Dramatic Cost Savings

ALYN Hospital Ensures High Availability And Disaster Recovery Protection

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ALYN Hospital Ensures High Availability And Disaster Recovery Protection For Its Critical Applications with SIOS DataKeeper

SIOS Chosen for its Cost-effectiveness and Application-agnostic Design

SAN MATEO, CA – March 5, 2019 – SIOS Technology Corp., the industry pioneer in providing intelligent application availability for critical workloads, today announced that ALYN Hospital is using SIOS DataKeeper software to provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for all of ALYN Hospital’s mission-critical applications. This includes electronic medical records, customer relationship management, SQL Server databases, Exchange and Office.

ALYN Hospital is acknowledged worldwide as a premier pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Israel. ALYN specializes in diagnosing and rehabilitating infants, children, and adolescents with physical disabilities, both congenital and acquired.

The IT Department at ALYN Hospital operates a variety of applications in a virtualized Microsoft Windows Server environment. “As a hospital, we are subject to some fairly strict government regulations, so we needed to implement strong business continuity provisions for many of our applications,” explained Uri Inbar, ALYN’s IT Director.

Hyper-V Replica, which is integral to Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, was an obvious choice for ALYN’s business continuity needs. The IT Department operates two, physically-separated server rooms on premises, which enables all critical virtual machines running on any Hyper-V host server to be replicated to another in the other room. “We were really struggling to satisfy our recovery point and recovery time objectives with this arrangement, so we started investigating other options,” Inbar recalled.

The Evaluation Criteria

To evaluate third-party failover clustering software, Inbar established three criteria: The solution had to work with existing hardware; it had to provide both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protections all of the hospital’s critical applications, and the total cost had to fit within the department’s limited budget. The IT staff quickly narrowed the third-party options to two, and after carefully evaluating both, found that only one met all of its criteria: DataKeeper from SIOS Technologies. “While we needed a solution that was cost-effective, we were determined not to sacrifice quality or capabilities,” Inbar emphasized. “With SIOS we found a solution that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership. For us, it was an obvious choice.”

The Results

SIOS DataKeeper is ideal for ALYN Hospital’s needs for high availability and disaster recovery protection. Because it is purpose-built to provide both HA and DR protections in a single, cost-effective solution. The ability to create 3-node SANless failover clusters with a single active and two standby instances has proven to be especially valuable for ALYN’s needs. “We are updating systems and software continuously, and with DataKeeper we can do that without any disruption to operations,” noted Inbar. Because the data replication supports multiple standbys and enables manual, dynamic assignment of the active and standby instances, the active instance can be moved to any server in a 3-node cluster and remain fully protected during periods of planned hardware and software maintenance.

Other SIOS DataKeeper features that are important to ALYN’s needs include the ability to work with any type of storage and WAN-optimized data replication. “The SIOS cluster seamlessly supports any storage volume recognized by Windows, and this substantially simplifies operations while enabling us to utilize all of our storage resources,” Inbar explained. Additionally, the WAN optimization will prove useful as Inbar and his team implement the remote disaster recovery site.

Inbar is confident the SIOS SANless failover cluster will perform as desired when needed: “We test the configuration regularly and routinely change the active and standby designations while redirecting the data replication as needed during planned software updates, and the applications have always continued to run uninterrupted. It just works and that’s very reassuring.”

“Whether your company’s critical applications are operating in a physical server environment, a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, they must be protected from downtime and data loss,” said Jerry Melnick, president and CEO, SIOS Technology. “ALYN is using SIOS to provide a fast, cost-effective high-availability solution for applications in a virtualized environment. I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes software products that provide insights and guidance that IT managers need to manage and protect business-critical applications in large, complex data centers. The company’s SIOS iQ is a machine learning analytics software that helps IT managers optimize performance, efficiency, reliability, and capacity utilization in virtualized environments. SIOS SAN and SANLess software is an essential part of any cluster solution that provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™ to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (http://us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan.

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS iQ, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, SIOS PERC Dashboard, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact:

Beth Winkowski
Winkowski Public Relations, LLC for SIOS
978-649-7189
bethwinkowski@US.SIOS.com

To see how other companies have enjoyed similar high availability and disaster recovery protection, read our SIOS success stories 

Read about how SIOS helped Alyn, go here

Azure Site Recovery for Disaster Recovery

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Ensure Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery

#IGNITE2018 Session: Ensure Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery

I’m a big fan of Azure Site Recovery for Disaster Recovery  So, I was glad to attend the Ignite session today presented by Rochak Mittal and Ashish Gangwar

Ensure Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery

#IGNITE2018 Session: Ensure Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery

I’m a big fan of Azure Site Recovery for Disaster Recovery  So, I was glad to attend the Ignite session today presented by Rochak Mittal and Ashish Gangwar 

BRK3304 – Architecting mission-critical, high-performance SAP workloads on Azure

This session about ensuring Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery is particularly informative. In one of the architecture slides, they showed how an entire SAP deployment could be protected by Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and recovered in the event of a disaster in just a few minutes. Using Azure Recovery Plans allows you to have explicit control over recovery. It includes creating dependencies on resources as well as invoking scripts within a VM to help facilitate the complete recovery.

It seems like yesterday. But it was back in May of 2014 when I first started assisting Microsoft with providing a HA solution for SAP ASCS in Azure. That solution involves using DataKeeper to build a SANless cluster solution for ASCS. It still stands today as the only HA solution that also works with ASR for disaster recovery configurations such as the one shown in this demo at Ignite.

Ensure Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery 
Shared disks in Azure with SIOS DataKeeper

Want to know how to Ensure Application Availability With Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery, let us know and we’ll be glad to help.
Reproduced with permission from Clusteringformeremortals.com

Disaster Recovery For SQL Server Standard Edition

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Disaster recovery for SQL Server Standard Edition

Replicating A 2-Node SQL Server 2012/2014 Standard Edition Cluster To A 3rd Server For Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery for SQL Server Standard Edition is possible with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition. Here’s how.

Many people have found themselves settling for SQL Server Standard Edition due to the cost of SQL Server Enterprise Edition. SQL Server Standard Edition has many of the same features, but it comes with a few limitations. One limitation is that it does not support AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Also, it only supports two nodes in a cluster. With Database Mirroring being deprecated and only supporting synchronous replication in Standard Edition, you really have limited disaster recovery options.

Disaster recovery for SQL Server Standard Edition

One of those options is SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition. DataKeeper will work with your existing shared storage cluster. The software allows you to extend it to a 3rd node using either synchronous or asynchronous replication. If you are using SQL Server Enterprise, simply add that 3rd node as another cluster member for a true multisite cluster. However, since we are talking about SQL Server Standard Edition, you can’t add a 3rd node directly to the cluster. The good news is DataKeeper will allow you to replicate data to a 3rd node so your data is protected.

Disaster recovery for SQL Server Standard Edition means you are going to use DataKeeper to bring that 3rd node online as the source of the mirror. Next use SQL Server Management Studio to mount the databases that are on the replicated volumes. Your clients will also need to be redirected to this 3rd node. But it is a very cost effective solution with an excellent RPO and reasonable RTO.

The SIOS documentation talks about how to do Disaster recovery for SQL Server Standard Edition. Here, I have summarized the steps recently for one of my clients.

Configuration

  • Stop the SQL Resource
  • Remove the Physical Disk Resource From The SQL Cluster Resource
  • Remove the Physical Disk from Available Storage
  • Online Physical Disk on SECONDARY server. Add the drive letter (if not there)
  • Run emcmd . setconfiguration <drive letter> 256
    and Reboot Secondary Server. This will cause the SECONDARY server to block access to the E driver. It’s an important step because you don’t want two servers have access to the E drive at the same time, if you can avoid it.
  • Online the disk on PRIMARY server
  • Add the Drive letter if needed
  • Create a DataKeeper Mirror from Primary to DR
    You may have to wait a minute for the E drive to appear available in the DataKeeper Server Overview Report on all the servers before you can create the mirror properly. If done properly, you will create a mirror from PRIMARY to DR. As part of that process DataKeeper will ask you about the SECONDARY server which shares the volume you are replicating.

In The Event Of Disaster ….

ON DR NODE

  • Run EMCMD . switchovervolume <drive letter>
  • The first time make sure the SQL Service account has read/write access to all data and log files. You WILL have to explicitly grant this access the very first time you try to mount the databases.
  • Use SQL Management Studio to mount the databases
  • Redirect all clients to the server in the DR site. Better yet have the applications that reside in the DR site pre-configured to point to the SQL Server instance in the DR site.

AFTER DISASTER IS OVER

  • Power the servers (PRIMAY, SECONDARY) in the main site back on
  • Wait for mirror to reach mirroring state
  • Determine which node was previous source (run PowerShell as an administrator)
    get-clusterresource -Name “<DataKeeper Volume Resource name>” | get-clusterparameter
  • Make sure no DataKeeper Volume Resources are online in the cluster
  • Start the DataKeeper GUI on one cluster node. Resolve any split brain conditions (most likely there are none) ensuring the DR node is selected as the source during any split-brain recovery procedures
  • On the node that was reported as the previous source run EMCMD . switchovervolume <drive letter>
  • Bring SQL Server online in Failover Cluster Manager

The above steps assume you have SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition installed on all three servers (PRIMARY, SECONDARY, DR). PRIMARY and SECONDARY are a two node shared storage cluster. You are replicating data to DR which is just a standalone SQL Server instance (not part of the cluster) with just local attached storage. The Disaster Recovery Server will have a volume(s) that is the same size and drive letter as the shared cluster volume(s). This works rather well and will even let you replicate to a target that is in the cloud if you don’t have your own Disaster Recovery site configured.

You can also build the same configuration using all replicated storage if you want to eliminate the SAN completely.

Here is a nice short video that illustrates some of the possible configurations for disaster recovery for SQL Server Standard Edition. http://videos.us.sios.com/medias/aula05u2fl

Reproduced with permission from Clusteringformeremortals.com

Meet Your Failover And Disaster Recovery Needs With SIOS

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Meet Your Failover And Disaster Recovery Needs With SIOS

SIOS Software Ensures 24/7 Availability, Failover And Disaster Recovery Of Theatre’s Online Ticketing System

The theatre with the highest regular annual attendance in the United Kingdom uses SIOS Protection Suite software. The software safeguard the online ticketing system keeping it available 24/7, even in the event of software bugs, hardware failure or unanticipated outages. SIOS Protection Suite meets Birmingham Hippodrome’s failover, replication and disaster recovery needs. The company moved off a hosted server and onto its own in-house networking infrastructure. By doing so, the theatre has freed itself to develop a new marketing strategy based around its website and database of customers.

The Challenge

Birmingham Hippodrome wrote a detailed specification. It called for a new network infrastructure that would deliver full failover and disaster recovery, with no single point of failure. The new infrastructure would need to be flexible and resilient. It would also need to enable them to tailor the system to improve marketing around its website and database of customers. That meant the infrastructure would essentially need to run all back office tasks. This includes a new e-mail system, the theatre’s own ticket booking, de-booking and credit card service.

The Solution

To deliver full failover and disaster recovery protection, IT infrastructure consultancy eSpida built two server rooms approximately one mile apart. Each replicating to the other. If one server failed, the other server would continue operations. They also implemented two leased lines and established two service providers at two points in the city with two separate main supplies. Birmingham wanted to simplify server “housekeeping.” The Hippodrome’s network infrastructure has been virtualised with 20 virtualised servers on IBM x3650 hardware and twin dual-core CPUs with 32 GB RAM and local disk. They use SIOS software to ensure continuous availability of applications and the online ticketing system.

SIOS Protection Suite creates a “mirrored” server system on the remote site that is identical to the primary server. If the primary server fails, SIOS software can shut it down and transfer all operations to the backup server while providing continuous access to applications and data. This capability ensures that both Birmingham Hippodrome staff and customers shopping for tickets online are unaffected by system failures or maintenance. SIOS software monitors system and application health, maintains client connectivity. It provides uninterrupted data access, giving Birmingham Hippodrome the reliable, fault-resilient system they need.

Benefit Of Failover And Disaster Recovery Solution

Another benefit of SIOS software is that installation and set-up is a quick and hassle-free process. High availability and protection of the theatre’s overall operations may have seemed like a daunting task. But SIOS Protection Suite was installed, configured, tested and in production within a few days.

For the first six months of operation, one of the servers was freezing up about once a month. In each case, SIOS software failed over to the back-up server in under a minute. The few initial instances of server failure went largely unnoticed, thanks to SIOS.

SIOS software enables Hippodrome to provide a total solution that includes hardware, installation, as well as supplementary services related to disaster recovery.

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS can meet your failover and disaster recovery needs, go here