In an update to its flagship high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution, Lifekeeper, SIOS rolled out some key features that include fully automated failover to DR nodes across AWS regions and availability zones (AZs) via WAN.
As businesses vow to bring refined digital experiences for customers, availability drops continue to be a key challenge. Any deviation from the norm, no matter how small, can send a business on a death spiral.
Application downtime is not merely a matter of a few hours of inconvenience. In critical industries like finance and healthcare, the repercussions are catastrophic. A small application failure or a momentary interruption can wreck systems in an instant, producing ripples of disruption at global scale.
It also leads to staggering financial losses for businesses. A 2022 research finds that large organizations pay approximately $9000 for every minute of downtime. Even higher are the stakes for company reputation and goodwill.
SIOS that celebrated its 25-year anniversary last year released SIOS Lifekeeper for Linux 9.9.0 in September. The release that combines a host of intelligent DR and HA features not only promises to protect against application availability interruptions, but also ensures greater security.
“We ensure faster recovery times and maintain data consistency across all environments, saving both time and reducing the potential for human error,” said Masahiro Arai, COO, in the press release.
The release brings failover sans time-taking resynchronization along with improved synchronous and asynchronous replication.
“SIOS has been well known to provide solid HA capabilities for Microsoft workloads. For those operating in clouds, they understand how complex DR can be and how necessary it is to operate across regions and AZ’s,” said Camberley Bates, a Futurum Group analyst.
v9.9.0 combines useful disaster recovery protection features like flexibility to create replication for geographically distributed DR sites, and a subscription add-on for DR performance and data integrity optimization.
SIOS provides HA clustering by leveraging cloud instances for redundancy including database products that have designed-in HA. The solution plugs into the applications and hosting platforms to monitor the entire stack of hardware, software and APIs allowing it to constantly track all components that can hurt application availability.
v9.9.0 takes this understanding to the next level elevating the DA capabilities. Lifekeeper constantly auto-checks the status of secondary and tertiary nodes so that if failover is required, it can do so seamlessly without losing availability or compromising integrity. Furthermore, single points of failure are circumvented by using multiple paths and resources that provide enhanced redundancy.
Margaret Hoagland, VP of global marketing, in an interview with Tech Field Day, noted that the upkeep of complex application environments falls on IT administrators who lack the specialized skills of the architects that design and develop those environments. This is causing their roles to shift, pushing them to be generalists than experts.
She added that increased dependency on applications for core operations, stricter requirements around RTO, RPO, and availability, and less control than before due to the use of cloud hypervisors and abstractions make it imperative that companies are armed with outstanding HA and DR products.
Security updates in the v9.9.0 include greater and more flexible access controls. It offer personalized access credentials that make operations traceable allowing administrators to review past activities for security investigations.
The new version also includes language support for Korean and German. v9.9.0 is priced at $2500 yearly per node.
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