Guest: Jason Huff (LinkedIn)
Company: SIOS Technology (Twitter)

Applications in the cloud are still vulnerable to unexpected outages and unplanned downtime. Cloud availability service level agreements (SLAs) usually just cover the hardware, so they can’t provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for stateful applications without degrading performance. Many HA clustering solutions, for instance, can’t failover across cloud regions.

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Jason Huff, Linux Product Owner at SIOS Technology, to discuss the current trends in the market, particularly in terms of high availability and disaster recovery.

Highlights of this video interview:

• Open-source clustering requires highly complicated scripting and is also prone to human error and failure. The manual steps required to ensure that these complicated ERPs or databases are complicated and extremely order-dependent. Therefore, IT teams become hesitant to perform regular maintenance and failover testing.
• If an application is critical to your day-to-day operations, then you need highly automated, high availability clustering in order to protect it.
• When a failure happens in the cloud, your application needs intelligent recovery of the failed components and all their dependencies.

Current trends in the market:

• More companies are moving their workloads to the cloud.
• There is an escalation in the complexity of technologies.
• There is an increase in the severity of threats to IT infrastructures, including resource starvation, natural disasters, power grid failures.
• Users are predominantly looking for solutions that provide high levels of protection, but they also want to reduce the complexity.
• System admins are changing in terms of their skills and knowledge. And they’re being redirected to focus their expertise in other critical areas because the expectation for these cloud technologies is that they’re simple, user friendly, intuitive, and easily accessible.

Benefits of high availability software:

• It is the first line of defense for identifying and remediating application failures. With these types of monitoring tools, a failure can be detected and remediated by the software, even before users see an impact.
• It helps reduce and potentially eliminate the downtime required for things like upgrades, patching, rolling, preventative maintenance by using the software’s switchover and failover capabilities. You can actively patch a server, update it, test it, and then promote it to the active availability node.
• It ensures critical systems are running on the latest and greatest release, but you’re also minimizing the risk of doing the upgrade.

SIOS helps companies by:

• Seeking more ways to build a better experience for users and enable them to leverage the power of the cloud without the risks.
• Working on streamlining its current failover engine.
• Adding more self-help tools and mechanisms so that when problems arise, customers will be better equipped to troubleshoot and restore their data and applications.
• Providing a consistent and reliable experience, regardless of whether customers are in a Windows or a Linux environment.
• SIOS LifeKeeper allows customers to create multiple identical clusters using consistent predefined settings, integrated best practices, so they can achieve 99.99% of availability and disaster protection for all of their workloads, whether they’re running on-prem, in the cloud, or some hybrid environment.
• SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux has a new feature to support SAP HANA multitarget, which gives users the ability to extend a traditional two-node failover cluster to include additional nodes and DR locations without needing complicated scripting and those administrative tasks that are prone to errors. LifeKeeper orchestrates the failover, manages the replication to the DR site, i.e., hands-free recovery from any types of faults, failures, or disasters.
• The SIOS all-in-one solution for cloud users handles high availability and disaster recovery protection in any combination of physical virtual, cloud, hybrid cloud. It also protects essential applications and databases such as HANA, Oracle, SQL Server, and MaxDB.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.