Guest: Margaret Hoagland
Company: SIOS Technology
Show: Mission Critical
Topic: High Availability

IT admins managing high availability across Linux and Windows environments have long faced an unnecessary burden: completely different interfaces for each operating system. SIOS Technology’s LifeKeeper v10 solves this with a unified web-based management console that delivers consistent experience across both platforms.

The Multi-Dashboard Problem

Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, identifies a fundamental friction point in modern HA management. “IT admins are being assigned to take on more responsibility for critical application high availability,” she explains. “And there’s a difference in how the interface was working for Windows versus Linux.”

This fragmentation creates operational inefficiency and unnecessary complexity. Organizations running mixed OS environments face a choice: train admins to work with two completely different interfaces, or maintain separate teams for each operating system. Neither option is cost-effective.

One Console, Zero Retraining

LifeKeeper v10 introduces a unified web-based management console with consistent look, feel, and experience across both Linux and Windows. “For customers with IT admins managing applications on both sides, or with different admins working across operating systems, it’s far more cost-effective and efficient to have a single interface,” Hoagland says.

Managed service providers immediately benefit from this unified approach. “MSPs find this particularly helpful because they don’t need to retrain staff who may be managing two different operating systems,” she notes. For MSPs overseeing hundreds or thousands of customer environments, eliminating retraining requirements directly reduces operational costs and accelerates staff productivity.

The Human Factor in HA Management

Beyond cost efficiency, the unified console addresses a critical reliability concern. “It just lends itself to a much easier experience for the IT admin, and that always translates to less human error and a more engaged customer,” Hoagland explains.

High availability systems protect mission-critical workloads where downtime has immediate business impact. Human error in HA configuration or management can lead to failed failovers, extended outages, or data loss. By simplifying the management experience and eliminating context switching between different interfaces, SIOS reduces cognitive load and the potential for mistakes.

Why This Matters for Enterprise IT

The shift toward unified HA management reflects broader changes in IT operations. As organizations consolidate infrastructure management and push more responsibility to generalist IT staff, tools must become simpler and more consistent. The era of specialized teams managing individual operating systems is giving way to unified operations teams managing diverse environments.

SIOS has focused on this admin-centric approach because the alternative—maintaining separate skill sets and tools for each OS—doesn’t scale. Organizations need their IT teams spending time on strategic initiatives, not retraining on interface differences between operating systems running the same high availability software.

A Foundation for Future Simplification

The unified console in LifeKeeper v10 represents more than interface consistency. It’s architectural foundation work that enables SIOS to deliver future features more quickly across both operating systems simultaneously, rather than developing and testing separate implementations.

For organizations evaluating high availability solutions for mixed Linux and Windows environments, SIOS LifeKeeper v10 addresses the operational reality that IT admins face: too many dashboards, inconsistent experiences, and unnecessary complexity. The unified console reduces all three while maintaining the robust, application-aware failover protection that mission-critical workloads require.