SIOS Chosen for its Cost-effectiveness and Application-agnostic Design
SAN MATEO, Calif. – SIOS Technology Corp., the industry pioneer in providing intelligent application availability for critical workloads, today announced that ALYN Hospital is using SIOS DataKeeper software to provide high-availability protection for all of ALYN Hospital’s mission-critical applications, including electronic medical records, customer relationship management, SQL Server databases, Exchange and Office.
ALYN Hospital is acknowledged worldwide as a premier pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Israel. ALYN specializes in diagnosing and rehabilitating infants, children and adolescents with physical disabilities, both congenital and acquired.
The IT Department at ALYN Hospital operates a variety of applications in a virtualized Microsoft Windows Server environment. “As a hospital we are subject to some fairly strict government regulations, so we needed to implement strong business continuity provisions for many of our applications,” explained Uri Inbar, ALYN’s IT Director.
Hyper-V Replica, which is integral to Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, was an obvious choice for ALYN’s business continuity needs. The IT Department operates two, physically-separated server rooms on premises, which enables all critical virtual machines running on any Hyper-V host server to be replicated to another in the other room. “We were really struggling to satisfy our recovery point and recovery time objectives with this arrangement, so we started investigating other options,” Inbar recalled.
The Evaluation Criteria
To evaluate third-party failover clustering software, Inbar established three criteria: The solution had to work with existing hardware; it had to provide both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protections all of the hospital’s critical applications; and the total cost had to fit within the department’s limited budget. The IT staff quickly narrowed the third-party options to two, and after carefully evaluating both, found that only one met all of its criteria: DataKeeper from SIOS Technologies. “While we needed a solution that was cost-effective, we were determined not to sacrifice quality or capabilities,” Inbar emphasized. “With SIOS we found a solution that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership. For us, it was an obvious choice.”
The Results
SIOS DataKeeper is ideal for ALYN Hospital’s needs because it is purpose-built to provide both HA and DR protections in a single, cost-effective solution.The ability to create 3-node SANless failover clusters with a single active and two standby instances has proven to be especially valuable for ALYN’s needs. “We are updating systems and software continuously, and with DataKeeper we can do that without any disruption to operations,” noted Inbar. Because the data replication supports multiple standbys, and enables manual, dynamic assignment of the active and standby instances, the active instance can be moved to any server in a 3-node cluster and remain fully protected during periods of planned hardware and software maintenance.
Other SIOS DataKeeper features that are important to ALYN’s needs include the ability to work with any type of storage and WAN-optimized data replication. “The SIOS cluster seamlessly supports any storage volume recognized by Windows, and this substantially simplifies operations while enabling us to utilize all of our storage resources,” Inbar explained. Additionally, the WAN optimization will prove useful as Inbar and his team implement the remote disaster recovery site.
Inbar is confident the SIOS SANless failover cluster will perform as desired when needed: “We test the configuration regularly, and routinely change the active and standby designations, while redirecting the data replication as needed during planned software updates, and the applications have always continued to run uninterrupted. It just works and that’s very reassuring.”
“Whether your company’s critical applications are operating in a physical server environment, a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, they must be protected from downtime and data loss,” said Jerry Melnick, president and CEO, SIOS Technology. “ALYN is using SIOS to provide a fast, cost-effective high-availability solution for applications in a virtualized environment. I applaud them for their use case and innovation and look forward to continuing to provide value to their HA and DR strategies.”
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About SIOS Technology Corp.
SIOS Technology Corp. makes software products that provide the insights and guidance that IT managers need to manage and protect business-critical applications in large, complex data centers. SIOS iQ is a machine learning analytics software that helps IT managers optimize performance, efficiency, reliability, and capacity utilization in virtualized environments. SIOS SAN and SANLess software is an essential part of any cluster solution that provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™ to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (http://us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.
SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS iQ, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, SIOS PERC Dashboard, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
