debunking myths about cloud high availability (ha) and disaster recovery (dr) myths

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Debunking the Myths: Cloud HA and DR

Common misconceptions about protecting applications and data in cloud environments.

Clusters Your Way.™

Gartner predicts that the bulk of new IT spending by 2016 will be for cloud computing platforms and applications and that nearly half of large enterprises will have cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

High availability and disaster protection in cloud environments is a critical need.

Source: Gartner Newsroom

Critical applications are moving to the cloud.


The myth: Public cloud deployments are automatically high availability environments where application downtime is negligible.

The truth: Clouds are not high availability environments unless you add HA protection.

Myth #1: Clouds are HA environments.

“The average unavailability of cloud

services is 10 hours per year or more,

while the average availability is

estimated to be 99.9% (9 hours or more

than a day of downtime), far less than the

expected availability of business critical

applications.” – Josh Whittaker, ZDNet


Some cloud solutions (i.e., Windows Azure) offer limited application protection through redundancy.

You can add some availability protection for web servers such as IIS by putting them in different fault domains and enabling load balancing.

Applications such as SQL Server and File Servers still need additional configuration for high availability and disaster recovery.

Redundancy is not enough.

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The myth: You cannot protect business critical applications in a public or private cloud by using a cluster. The truth. Traditional HA in a physical deployment is with a failover cluster using a shared storage (SAN). Public clouds (ie, Amazon EC2, Azure) have no concept of a cluster-aware shared storage.

However, you can create a #SANLess cluster software for HA and DR protection in a cloud environment.

Myth #2: You can’t have cluster protection in a cloud.


An easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR for SQL, Oracle, SAP or other business critical applications in a cloud.

Add SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to a WSFC or SIOS Protection Suite in a Linux environment.

SIOS software synchronizes local attached storage using real time, block level replication.

Eliminates the cost, complexity, and single point of failure risk of SAN storage.

What is a #SANLess Cluster?

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The myth: Applications and data are protected from disasters in the cloud without additional configuration.The truth: Cloud providers experience downtime and regional disasters like any other large organization.

Build a #SANLess cluster within a cloud and extend it by adding more node(s) in an alternate datacenter or different geographic region. Adding a third, geographically separated node can an RPO of near zero data loss and an RTO of about one minute.

Myth #3: You don’t need remote replication for DR.


The myth: You can either run your application in the cloud or in your on-premises data center, but not both. The truth: You can have both. Use your on-premises datacenter as your primary site and the cloud as your hot standby DR site. On-premise servers can be SAN-based or #SANLess clusters or a single server not participating in a cluster.

Cost effective alternative to building out your own DR site, or renting rack space in a business continuity facility.

Myth #4: Using the cloud is an “all or nothing” decision.


The myth: Creating an HA environment in a cloud requires complex scripting, specialized skills, or added complexity. The truth: An HA cluster in a cloud takes just three easy steps using SIOS #SANLess cluster software. Intuitive configuration wizard helps build a cluster in minutes without specialized skills. No need to build out a DR site.Use Standard Edition instead of costly Enterprise Edition of Windows apps (SQL) with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition for HA and DRReplicate to a third node outside of the cloud for cost-efficient disaster protection.

Myth #5: HA in a cloud is costly and complicated.


About high availability and disaster recovery in cloud environments?

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debunking myths about cloud high availability (ha) and disaster recovery (dr) myths

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