SIOS Technology today announced that MailHippo is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to protect their critical secure email platform from downtime and disasters. MailHippo enables healthcare providers to send and receive encrypted HIPAA compliant emails and to collect medical data using HIPAA compliant Web forms.

“When protecting mission-critical applications, companies like MailHippo face the challenge of delivering HA and DR to ensure 24/7 uptime,” said Margaret Hoagland, Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, SIOS Technology. “SIOS eliminates this challenge by providing flexible, straightforward HA and DR solutions that protect applications both on-premises and in the cloud, ensuring compliance with even the strictest compliance regulations.”

The Challenge: Cost-effective High Availability for SQL Server

MailHippo’s business-critical encrypted email platform runs on SQL Server 2016 instances in two geographically separated, on-premises data centers. The company needed a robust high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solution to protect the SQL Server database that their mission-critical applications run on. “Our medical provider customers expect their HIPAA compliant email to be available 24/7,” said Chris Almond, CEO, MailHippo. “Their information is essential to their ability to provide vital health services to their patients.”

The company considered using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Always On Availability Groups to add HA protection. However, they did not want the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the shared storage required by this solution, which would also introduce the risk of a single point of failure.

“We needed an affordable, reliable solution that would allow us to use SQL Server Standard Edition,” said Almond. They also wanted to leverage their two on-premises data centers running across different geographic regions to provide disaster recovery protection.

The Solution: SANless High Availability & Disaster Recovery

After rigorous research of HA/DR products, MailHippo decided to build a two-node cluster using SQL Server Standard Edition Always On Failover clustering in one data center and a third node in their second data center for disaster recovery. By simply adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to their WSFC, the company could replicate local storage on the primary cluster node synchronously to the second node and asynchronously to the third node.

With this cluster configuration, if a SQL Server failure on the primary cluster node is detected, operation is automatically moved to the secondary node and operation continues. Since DataKeeper synchronizes local storage on both primary and secondary nodes, operation can continue with an RPO of zero. In the event of a site-wide disaster, operation can be switched to the DR site.

MailHippo has been using SIOS SANless clusters and achieving high availability and disaster protection. By using SANless clusters, MailHippo also eliminated the single point of failure risk of a shared storage cluster. “SIOS DataKeeper is a great fit for a rapidly growing company like ours. It’s easy to use, cost-efficient and most of all, reliable,” added Almond.