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

For decades, high availability and disaster recovery solutions have protected mission-critical workloads, but managing them has remained unnecessarily complex. Sysadmins juggle multiple dashboards, inconsistent interfaces, and growing responsibility—often without specialized training. SIOS Technology’s LifeKeeper v10 addresses this friction head-on with a unified web-based management console that works seamlessly across Linux and Windows environments.

The Core Problem: Fragmented HA Management

Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, explains that IT admins today face a fundamental challenge. “IT admins are being assigned to take on more responsibility for critical application high availability, and there’s a difference in how the interface was working for Windows versus Linux,” she says.

Organizations running mixed OS environments previously dealt with separate interfaces for each operating system. This created training overhead, operational inefficiency, and increased risk of human error. For managed service providers, the problem multiplied—staff managing both operating systems needed separate training and expertise.

LifeKeeper v10 introduces a unified web-based management console with consistent look, feel, and experience across both Linux and Windows. “It’s much more cost effective and efficient to have one interface,” Hoagland notes. “MSPs find this particularly helpful because they don’t need to retrain their staff who might be managing the two different kinds of operating systems.”

Admin-Centric Design for Modern IT Realities

SIOS positions LifeKeeper v10 as a step toward “admin-centric HA”—a recognition that high availability management has shifted from specialists to generalists. “The work to keep those IT applications up and running has now been pushed down to more junior staff, or more generalist staff,” Hoagland explains.

High availability touches the entire IT infrastructure—network, storage, operating system, hardware, and software must all function together. That’s complex work now falling to IT admins who may not be HA experts.

“We are automating many tasks. We are adding control. We’re adding observability,” Hoagland says. “We are working on a system that allows folks who are not HA experts to be able to manage systems effectively to avoid downtime where possible, and to understand the causes of failover when they happen.”

Unified Interface Delivers Operational Benefits

The new console centers on what SIOS calls the resource hierarchy—a visual representation of all elements that need to fail over in a clustering environment. IT admins can see at a glance which resources are protected, their relationships, the order they should come online, and their status.

“An IT admin can see at a glance which of those are being protected, what the relationship is among those as they are failed over, and their status in the clustering environment,” Hoagland explains. This consistency across operating systems eliminates context switching and reduces cognitive load for sysadmins.

Simplified Pricing and Packaging

Beyond the technical improvements, SIOS addressed a business friction point. LifeKeeper’s application-aware protection requires separate modules for different applications—SQL Server, SAP, SAP HANA—and different environments like various cloud platforms or on-premises infrastructure.

“There were a lot of different kinds of moving parts there for the end user to think about when they were placing an order,” Hoagland acknowledges. The new pricing schema is straightforward and transparent. “We wanted to make sure that our customers know exactly what they’re buying and what they’re getting and how to understand the value of their purchase.”

What Sets SIOS Apart

Unlike HA solutions tied to specific operating systems, SIOS focuses exclusively on high availability. “We are focused on high availability, and we deal with the largest organizations with the most complex environments,” Hoagland says.

SIOS has 25 years of experience supporting complex, mission-critical workloads. “We work very closely with developing relationships with companies that we are working with so that we’re not about selling software licenses. We’re about ensuring high availability for our customers,” she adds.

The Future of HA Management

Looking ahead, Hoagland sees the trend of IT admins taking on more responsibility continuing to grow. Organizations bring in expert architects to design and set up systems, but day-to-day operations fall to IT admins.

“What we really need is for IT admins themselves to have a level of observability and control, to anticipate problems and fix them before they happen,” she says. When failover occurs and operations continue, admins need to understand why it happened and what steps prevent future issues.

LifeKeeper v10 provides the foundation for this future—empowering IT generalists to manage complex environments with confidence, without overwhelming training requirements or additional effort.

For organizations managing mission-critical workloads across Linux and Windows environments, SIOS LifeKeeper v10 represents a meaningful shift toward unified, simplified HA/DR management that matches how modern IT teams actually work.