SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SAN and SANLess clustering software products, announced that Mavis Discount Tire is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to ensure HA for its mission-critical SQL Server applications.

Mavis Discount Tire is a New York-based tire retailer with 150 stores throughout the northeastern US. The company relies on business critical applications running on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition to manage their orders, inventory, and other business-critical processes. For retail stores, application performance is a critical priority.

“Our retail stores need fast, reliable access to these applications to operate,” said Edward Schwartz, CIO, Mavis Discount Tire. “To keep customer satisfaction high, we cannot afford slow response times or downtime.”

The company needed a way to provide HA protection for its SQL Server applications and databases that would not impede performance. The company considered using traditional clustering using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). However, to implement a traditional cluster solution and maintain the high level of performance they needed, Mavis Discount Tire would have required multiple SANs and both dedicated and redundant external switches.

“While a traditional WSFC environment would have protected our applications from downtime, it requires SAN storage which adds cost, complexity, and performance overhead,” said Schwartz.

Since the company does not store large volumes of data, they saw little value in the storage benefits of deploying external SANs. They were also concerned about the performance impact that SAN storage could have had on the highly transactional SQL Server databases.

The Mavis Discount Tire IT department chose SIOS SANLess software to provide HA and DR protection without the need for a SAN.

“We used WSFC to create two node clusters for our SQL environments in the same way a traditional cluster is created,” said Schwartz. “We simply added SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to enable the cluster to use local storage in a SANLess configuration.”

The SIOS software uses performance optimized host-based replication to synchronize local storage on the primary and standby nodes in the cluster so that it appears to the WSFC as a SAN. SIOS #SANLess cluster software provides HA without slowing performance. They also eliminated the single point of failure risk of a shared storage cluster.

“The SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is a good technology for a company that is growing rapidly. It is easy to use and eliminates the need to buy unnecessary SAN hardware or redundant switches,” said Schwartz.

“SIOS is providing opportunities for the creation of SAN and SANLess clusters for physical, virtual and cloud environments,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology. “SIOS DataKeeper is a virtual SAN that runs under the application layer of SQL Server, allowing Mavis Tire to create SANLess clusters and benefit from all advantages of a second SAN without the performance challenges and added costs.”

Originally posted on StorageNewsletter.com on 12/19/2014.