Asite Turns to SIOS for High Availability Protection in Cloud Environment

SIOS Technology Corp., an industry leader in application high availability and disaster recovery, announced that Asite, provider of the Asite CDE open platform for construction management, is using SIOS DataKeeper to achieve high availability of its critical applications in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment. Asite CDE enables construction industry companies to collaborate, plan, design and build capital projects with seamless information sharing across the supply chain.

The Asite CDE platform comprises several Microsoft SQL Server databases and a critical file system. Downtime for these vital components could cause costly interruption of operation for end users who rely on the CDE platform for coordinating and managing activities at large construction projects. “In today’s world, moving to a cloud environment seems to be an attractive choice,” said Rupendrasingh Butola, Asite’s Director of Platform Operations.

Asite wanted to migrate their CDE platform as well as the SQL Server databases and file system it relies on from a hosted service provider environment to a public cloud environment. For this migration to be successful, they needed to ensure they could maintain the same level of high availability (HA) protection in the cloud as they had in their managed hosting environment.

“When migrating mission-critical applications to the public cloud, companies like Asite face the challenge of delivering HA and DR in the cloud,” said Masahiro Arai, Chief Operating Officer, SIOS Technology. “SIOS eliminates this challenge by providing flexible, straightforward HA and DR solutions that protect applications both on-premises and in the cloud.”

Seamless Integration and Failover Protection in the Cloud

The Asite R&D team wanted a solution that would integrate seamlessly with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and fail over across nodes located in different cloud availability zones and regions for disaster recovery.

Asite chose SIOS DataKeeper to maintain the HA of its business-critical SQL Server database and file system clusters in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment, and in their on-premises production environments in seven of its data centers. Asite created a WSFC environment, then added SIOS DataKeeper host-based, block-level replication to create a flexible SANless cluster. SIOS DataKeeper synchronizes local storage on each cluster node, making it appear to WSFC as traditional shared storage and enabling WSFC to fail over across cloud availability zones and regions for 99.99% application availability without the cost, complexity, or single point of failure risk of shared storage.

Migrating SQL Server and File System to Azure with SIOS Data Keeper

“HA is the most critical aspect of the Asite CDE platform,” said Butola. “With our transition from a managed hosting environment to a public cloud, database HA was a major concern. SIOS helped us overcome this concern and removed a potential show-stopper in our migration plans.”

SIOS DataKeeper also allows Asite to use fast SSD storage in the public cloud and in on-premises virtual servers for added performance. The SIOS cluster implementation process was user-friendly and documentation was clear and helpful. “The seamless transition of databases, as well as file system cluster nodes, has made us confident in our selection,” said Butola.

Asite realized a variety of benefits by using SIOS DataKeeper, including:

• High availability of the services (database and file system);
• Seamless transition of the services;
• Care-free maintenance of the platform; and
• Responsive support in case of any queries

“SIOS is the reason we have not worried about the database and file system HA,” said Butola. “SIOS DataKeeper enabled us to successfully migrate these business-critical workloads to the cloud and to reduce our platform operating costs significantly.”