Enterprises Adopt SIOS Technology SANLess Clustering Software on Amazon Web Services for Cloud HA and DR

SOURCE: SIOS Technology Corp.

SAN MATEO, CA – May 11, 2015 – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that leading enterprise companies are turning to its SANLess clustering software, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, to provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) of critical data on business critical applications in Amazon Web Services cloud environments.  Some of these enterprises include Gulliver International, a Tokyo-based pre-owned car company; Epicure Selections, Canada’s leading direct sales company; and Spirent, a global leader in communications test and measurement.

“Business critical applications require high availability protection, regardless of where they are deployed,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology.  “In the cloud, you need to protect applications from downtime just as you do in a physical server environment. However, traditional solutions, such as shared-storage clusters may not be practical or even possible in the cloud. With SIOS SANLess clustering software, enterprises are able to use traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for SQL Server and other enterprise applications in the cloud without the limitations of shared storage.”

Most cloud providers enable a measure of disaster protection by allowing enterprises to use multiple separate and redundant data centers or computing resources. However, they do not offer shared storage (i.e., a SAN), which is required to support traditional Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for high availability. SANless software can be added to a WSFC to create a high availability cluster without the need for shared storage. With it, companies can quickly and easily run their business critical applications, such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel Gateway, and others, in a cloud environment without sacrificing high availability protection.

Gulliver International

To accommodate rapid growth, Gulliver has instituted a “cloud-first” policy for all new applications and chose to move all of its internal IT systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS). They are using WSFC and SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to build SANless, cloud-based clusters to provide high availability protection for important applications. SANless clusters enable them to deploy their application in AWS in minutes and to manage their clusters without changes to their WSFC procedures.

“We would not consider moving our applications to the cloud without an efficient, easy-to-implement high availability solution,” said Manabu Tsukishima, IT manager, Gulliver International.

Epicure Selections

Epicure Selections uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition: a public website that provides product, company, and consultant enrollment information to its network of 16,000 consultants and an internal website that enables consultants to place product orders. Using SIOS DataKeeper clustering software they created a two-node cluster in a failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in their data center and the second node is in the Amazon cloud. SIOS software enables them to provide HA and DR protection using the cloud instead of needing to build out a remote DR location or to buy costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition application licenses.

“The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Russell Born, senior network infrastructure administrator, Epicure. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”

Spirent Communications

Spirent decided to move its entire data center to the cloud. For this move to be successful, Spirent IT staff needed to provide high availability for its Siebel Gateway Server and File Server application environments. Spirent chose SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition and built two-node clusters in the cloud using standard WSFC and adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software as an ingredient. The SIOS software uses efficient, real-time replication to synchronize storage between instances in different Availability Zones, making them appear to WSFC as a SAN. The solution was fast and easy to deploy, allowing them to protect their business’ most important applications and to successfully move to a cloud-first data center.

“We were able to configure the clusters just as we would in a WSFC environment so we did not need specialized skills or a SAN administrator,” said Sohamn Chatterjee, senior business systems architect, Spirent. “The SIOS software enabled us to implement our move to the cloud efficiently.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own.An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software 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. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.