Guest: Devin Haynes
Company: SIOS Technology
Show: Let’s Talk

SIOS is helping make the transition from On-Prem to Cloud easier.

As a Senior Scrum Master, Devin Haynes is in charge of development teams for SIOS Technology. One of her primary tasks is making sure the developers have everything they need to do their jobs, which entails removing any impediments, helping with planning, and anything else, outside of coding, to help teams move forward and keep on track for releases.

SIOS is also responsible for the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, which has some new features geared especially for cloud environments. With the latest release, the company is offering what they call an internal load balancer, which helps customers track traffic to the correct active node through a health check probe. The health check probe finds, in the application, where the node exists and makes sure all incoming traffic is directed to the correct, active node.

SIOS approaches High Availability (HA) solutions differently than other companies. According to Haynes, “Our product is able to monitor each component of an application so not just the server, but also the operating system, network, the disk, file shares, and lots of other things.” This is done through application recovery kits, which support services like SAP HANA, SQL Server, and Oracle. These recovery kits help to reduce the complexity it takes to configure a failover cluster and ensure an application fails over in accordance with best practices. With the SIOS product, users can also create custom recovery kits.

As far as competition in the space is concerned, Haynes says, “We have a lot of the OS marketers who have their own version of HA, but we really focus on people that can go through all different kinds of OSs. So we’re not just focused on the one, we can support RHEL, SUSE, and lots of different ones.”

SIOS offers solutions that accommodate transitions from on-premise to cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Their tools help make those transitions considerably easier. And with their SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, the company plans on continuing its focus on the cloud to ease customer migration.

Summary for this interview/discussion was written by Jack Wallen

Here is the edited transcript of the interview.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to TFiR Let’s Talk. Today we have with us Devin Haynes, Senior Scrum Master at SIOS Technology Corp. Devin, it’s great to have you on the show. What exactly is Senior Scrum Master? Tell us about what you do at SIOS.

Devin Haynes: So as a senior scrum master, I am basically in charge of the development teams and make sure that they have everything they need to be able to do their jobs correctly. So I help remove any impediments, help them with their planning, all the things that will be required outside of the coding part that they do. I help the teams move forward and keep on track for our releases.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent! Now I do know what you do there. Devin, if you can also quickly tell about the latest SIOS Protection Suite for Linux. What new feature announcements are there for especially cloud environments?

Devin Haynes: Yeah, so as part of our release we have for the Google Cloud platform, we are offering what we call the internal load balancer tool. So this tool really helps our customers be able to track that traffic to the correct active node through what we called a health check probe. So that health check probe finds in the application where the active node exists. And it makes sure all that incoming traffic is directed to that correct active node. So that’s one new feature we have in the cloud this release.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you just look at High Availability (HA) solutions, it’s not that crowded market. But there are other approaches as well. Can you quickly talk a bit about how SIOS’ approach is a bit different from how others approach HA, especially for Linux?

Devin Haynes: Yeah, our product is able to monitor each component of an application so not just the server, but also the operating system, network, the disk, file shares, and lots of other things that are all included in that. And with that, we do that through what we call our application recovery kits, and so our recovery kits, they support SAP HANA, SQL Server, and Oracle as well. So we have many recovery kits, and these kits reduce the complexity it takes to configure an actual failover cluster, and it ensures that our application fails over in accordance with best practices. And so in addition, users can also create their own custom recovery kits using a generic application, which is a great feature. So this gives our customers lots of options and numerous possibilities in terms of HA.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Who would you consider your competitor in this space?

Devin Haynes: So we have quite a few, I would guess. So we have a lot of the OS marketers who have their own version of HA, but we really focus on people that can go through all different kinds of OSs. So we’re not just focused on the one, we can support RHEL, SUSE, and lots of different ones. So we are in a place where we can compete with a lot of different companies in that space.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you talk about what are the challenges that customers face when it comes to High Availability and how does SIOS help them?

Devin Haynes: So when customers are making that transition from an on-prem machine to the cloud, there’s a lot of differences in the cloud, and there’s several cloud options. So at SIOS, we have solutions that accommodate a lot of those options. So we can help with your Google transition, your Azure, and your AWS transition. A lot of companies aren’t sure about how that setup works, so a lot of our tools really help in making that transition a lot easier. Our product really gives a clear way to do that set up without a whole lot of headache.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s go back and talk about SAP HANA. If you look at the SAP HANA environment, what are the challenges that companies face when they try to perform maintenance for application availability there?

Devin Haynes: Yeah, so a lot of the SAP HANA databases for some companies are very large databases, and companies don’t like to take those down for a long period of time for maintenance. And so SAP HANA has a feature that’s called the takeover with handshake that we’ve added to our kit as well, and what the takeover with handshake does is it allows you to suspend the primary database instead of shutting it all the way down, and letting that backup secondary node take that primary role so you can perform maintenance. So it basically gives you a lot of that time back that you would lose if you had to do a full shutdown. So just by suspending that primary database instead of doing a full shut down, that really, really gives a lot of our customers some time back in that maintenance window that they have.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you just look at SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, (of course I’m not asking you to make any news announcements here), what kind of roadmap do you have, or going forward, what are the things you are going to focus on?

Devin Haynes: Yeah, so we’re going to continue our focus on the cloud, which is where the business and everyone seems to be going these days. So I’m focusing on the cloud, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Getting our capabilities and enhancements there will really help our customers, so we’re seeing a lot of traffic there. So that’s where we want to continue our focus.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Devin, thank you so much for taking time out today and not only talk about some of the features of the latest SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, but also talk a bit about the High Availability market and also how you also help SAP HANA users. So thanks for your insight, and I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Devin Haynes: Thank you.