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White Paper: Building Management Systems and the Need for High Availability

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White Paper Building Management Systems and the Need for High Availability

White Paper: Building Management Systems and the Need for High Availability

BMS solutions are central to the building or campus they manage, so they need to be protected from unscheduled downtime and disaster-related outages. Indeed, given that they control a building’s most vital safety services, a BMS must remain operational and accessible, particularly in an emergency. The challenge is, how do you configure a BMS solution to operate at such a high level of availability without adding unnecessary cost and complexity?

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Reproduced with permission from SIOS

High Availability Cluster Solution For High Service Level

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The effortless way to High Availability Cluster Solution For High Service Level

Improve Ordering Process with High Availability Cluster Solution

The Japan Contact Lens Association has an online ordering system that takes in orders from dealers to manufacturers and agents all year round. SCSK Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as SCSK) manages this system. They added SCSK’s infrastructure cloud service “USiZE Shared Model” with an operating rate of 99.99%. At the same time, they included LifeKeeper to secure a high occupancy rate in the cloud and DataKeeper to build an operational infrastructure with High Availability Cluster Solution. With these softwares, the team could detected abnormalities not only on hardware and virtual machines, and applications. They have set up a system to quickly restore and continue services even in case of a crisis.

Contact Lens Ordering Platform That Provides 24 Hours 365 Days Service To The Cloud

The Japan Contact Lens Association supports the dissemination of contact lenses and the development of the industry. They operate a network system called “CLIOS (Contact Lens Information & Order System)”. “Web-CLIOS” is an ordering system that can easily place orders from web browsers anytime and anywhere.

High Availability Function To Monitor Applications To Minimize Business Impact In Case Of Failure

The USiZE shared model was supposed to be used as a new operational infrastructure of “Web-CLIOS”. It not only provides computing resources, but also provides system operation know-how acquired over 40 years and ITIL. The latter is a best practice in IT service management and a feature that provides high-quality service. However, even this is not perfect. “To realize the service level required by the Japan Contact Lens Association, we needed a mechanism to increase the availability of the application layer,” Mr. Ishihara said. The USiZE shared model is also equipped with high availability function. For example, if a failure occurs in the host server, you can easily move the virtual machine running on it to another healthy host server easily. It can be failed over. However, what can be monitored with the native virtualization infrastructure is only the state of the guest OS. It is impossible to detect failure of the application. Tesio Abe of senior engineer at SCSK cloud service department, explains, “Although the host server and guest OS appear to be operating normally, the application running on it seems to freeze or go down due to some reason. In the case of mission-critical services like “Web-CLIOS”, high availability functions that can monitor applications are essential.”

Short Failover Time With LifeKeeper and DataKeeper

In order to solve this problem, SCSK focused on cloud-ready High Availability Cluster Solution. After comparing and examining products of several vendors, they adopted LifeKeeper. Makoto Nagashima, SCSK Cloud Service Department Foundation Service Manager, said the High Availability Cluster Solution could maintain reliable operation for a long time.

Above all, it is also easy to install. High-speed data mirroring is performed by DataKeeper as a shared storage between the production node and the standby node. Even if abnormality occurs in the production node, LifeKeeper has a mechanism that can fail over in a shorter time which cannot be found with other products.

High Availability Brought About By “Protection Suite” Will Be Their Weapons For the Future

Although more than two years have already passed since the renewal of “Web-CLIOS”, the system infrastructure has continued to operate steadily without causing serious troubles.

SCSK says it will actively utilize “Protection Suite” in other services and projects. Ikeda said, “While high-speed availability of “mission critical “cloud migration is expected to accelerate, LifeKeeper and DataKeeper’s advanced availability for SCSK consulting /SI business and cloud services will become our weapon for the future.”

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped Japan Contact Lens Association achieve High Availability Cluster Solution, go here

SIOS Protection Suite Ensures High Availability Cluster Solution

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SIOS Protection Suite Ensures High Availability Cluster Solution

Protecting Data Aggregation, Processing And Transition Of The Central Bank of the Russian Federation With SIOS

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation (the Bank of Russia) payment system needed a High Availability Cluster Solution. The bank comprises more than 600 bank offices, 1,100 commercial banks and 2,400 side offices that provide financial services to hundreds of thousands of governmental and public organizations, and commercial companies across Russia. The complex daily account routines at all these organizations generate more than a billion electronic filings every year. In the Moscow region, these functions are performed by a dedicated organization called the Interregional Center for Informatization of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (ICI BR). ICI BR has built a special Information and Reference System (IRS) that works as a wide area network (WAN) with geographically dispersed data sources that send information to the main data center. To protect this critical system, they chose SIOS Protection Suite for Linux with data replication to ensure high availability and data integrity of IRS’s key components.

The Challenge

ICI BR chose FOBOS PLUS Co., Ltd., an experienced system integrator that specializes in building highly available data centers with an emphasis on data integrity and security features to develop the Bank of Russia payment system’s IRS. After conducting a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the IC BR needs and requirements, FOBOS PLUS engineers set out to create a system that would combine the required functionality at a moderate price. Cost factors guided the company’s choice to use industry standard platforms and open source operating systems. To achieve high availability, they implemented key components of the Bank of Russia’s IRS as fault tolerant cluster solutions. FOBOS PLUS engineers needed a solution that met a broad range of requirements.

They needed a cluster solution that would ensure high availability for both Oracle databases and custom applications and enable data replication over local area networks to eliminate shared storage use.

High Availability Cluster Solution

After detailed analysis of various cluster solutions’ features and specifications, they chose SIOS Protection Suite for Linux with data replication. SIOS Protection Suite would provide safe and seamless failover in the event of primary system faults and the ability to maintain continuous data replication between cluster nodes. The cluster was initially configured in a test environment to assure its effectiveness. And also to fine-tune the custom applications that should work in high availability mode. After the full testing cycle was completed, they needed less than a week to deploy the cluster at the ICI BR data center. They built twin two-node clusters, one located at a primary data center and the other at a backup center. Both clusters maintain continuous data replication between cluster nodes. The key reasons for choosing SIOS Protection Suite as a cluster solution included the platform’s affordable price. As well as open source operating system and support for Oracle DBMS support and custom applications. The SIOS Protection Suite High Availability Cluster Solution virtually eliminates data loss due to hardware or software faults. Also it provides high availability for applications and processed data.

Benefits

SIOS Protection Suite and its high availability cluster core achieved all project objectives quickly and with minimal expense. The solution’s scalability also allows the system to convert into geographically dispersed clusters with primary and backup data centers operating as nodes. This allow them to add disaster recovery at virtually no additional cost. The SIOS clusters will easily withstand not just one server loss but an entire primary site loss. In the worst-case scenario, SIOS Protection Suite will seamlessly restart all applications on the backup site machines. Then it would continue to provide continuous data replication to ensure little to no data loss. Finally this would enable the entire system to continue operating normally. After finishing test and deployment procedures, both FOBOS PLUS and ICI’s engineers praised SIOS Protection Suite’s intuitive graphical user interface. It allowed them to easily configure and monitor the cluster status. Furthermore, it provided comprehensive information on node and application status on a single screen. It even extends high availability by making potential problems immediately identifiable to users.

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped Central Bank of Russia achieve high availability cluster solution, go here