Listen to this articleSan Mateo, California headquartered company SIOS Technology develops software products that maximize availability and efficiency of virtualized environments in large, complex data centers. Below is our interview with Jerry Melnick, COO at SIOS Technology. Jerry has more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software industry and he is responsible for defining corporate strategy and operations at SIOS Technology.
Q: Jerry, tell us something more about SIOS Technology?
A: SIOS Technology is in business to protect data and ensure application availability. More specifically, we make software products that provide the insights and guidance IT managers need to manage and protect business critical applications in large, complex data centers. SIOS innovates across two main product lines:
• SIOS iQ is a machine learning operations analytics software platform that helps IT managers understand and resolve complex problems in virtualized environments.
• SIOS SAN and SANLess clustering software is an essential ingredient for almost any cluster solution that provides the flexibility to build clusters that best suit your environment to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environments in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability.
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Q: SAN-based clusters have been the traditional way to protect critical applications and data. Is this still the case?
A: Traditional clusters based on shared storage (typically SAN) are no longer the de facto choice for providing high availability and disaster protection for business critical applications. Companies are finding new ways to combine physical, virtual, and cloud environments into new configurations to control costs and stay agile in today’s demanding marketplace. In these environments, traditional SAN-based clusters can have significant drawbacks. Shared storage is not typically offered in cloud environments. SAN storage can be costly to buy and require specialized skills to manage and SANs also introduce the risks of a single point of failure. In these environments, SANless clusters provide the same level of protection without requiring shared storage or limiting configuration flexibility, making them a better option.
Q: How can a SANless cluster make providing disaster protection easier?
A: A SANless cluster solution gives you more options for implementing disaster protection. You can replicate between any two environments physical, virtual, or cloud for disaster protection. For example, you can maintain a SAN or SANLess cluster at your primary data center and add a node or nodes in a public cloud for disaster recovery. This configuration not only saves the cost of SAN storage, but also the cost of building out a remote data center.
You can create SANless clusters in a public cloud with nodes in separate geographic zones or even in two different public cloud provider environments, such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure for protection from local, regional, and even provider-wide outages.
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Q: Can you use a SANless cluster in a virtual server environment?
A: Yes you can. In fact, SANless clusters eliminate the limitations imposed when you use traditional shared storage based technology for clustering VM’s in a virtual environment. When using traditional shared storage clustering in VMware virtual server environments, you need to use Raw Disk Mapping (RDM). This is a complex storage setup that limits desirable virtual machine functionality and mobility such as VMotion/Live Migration. In contrast, SANless clustering supports all of the flexibility and agility offered in the virtual environment. It does this by allowing you to use virtual disks native to the hypervisor such as VMDK’s or VHDs thereby eliminating the need for RDM.
Q: SIOS appears to be trail-blazing new innovations to provide better insights and actionable data in virtualized environments. Can you elaborate on your efforts here?
A: Sure. We developed SIOS iQ after identifying a gap in the existing tools used to address infrastructure problems in very complex, dynamic virtualized environments. We wanted to enable IT Operations Managers to quickly address the root cause of performance problems, identify under used resources, and optimize configurations to help them get the most value from their virtualized environment. We focused first on VMware environments to ensure our platform would benefit the most users. Using advanced machine learning, we were able to eliminate false positives and alert storms, providing customers with the information they need in an easy to use, graphical interface.
Q: How were these problems addressed traditionally?
A: Optimizing application environments in VMware has been a highly manual, time-consuming process, requiring significant guesswork and continuous adjustment. Traditional operational analytics approaches focus on recording and reporting discrete events – for example, CPU utilization exceeding a particular threshold. However, these traditional event-based approaches fall short in today’s increasingly complex and dynamic environments. SIOS iQ provides a simple, intelligent way to ensure business critical application environments in VMware are optimized for performance, efficiency, reliability, and capacity.
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Q: What makes SIOS iQ unique in the market?
A: SIOS iQ is the industry’s first simple, intelligent software solution for understanding IT operations and resolving issues in dynamic VMware environments. Designed to be a primary resource for IT operations information and issue resolution, SIOS iQ employs patented machine learning and applies advanced data analytics/Big Data approach to a broad range of data sets – including application and infrastructure data from third party tools and frameworks – to recognize abnormal patterns of behavior and identify root causes of performance issues.
The breadth of data SIOS iQ integrates and the ease-of-use designed into the patented SIOS PERC Dashboard™ are unique in the industry. By aggregating and analyzing a broad range of data using advanced machine learning, SIOS iQ puts the key information at their fingertips enabling IT managers to ensure their applications are operating efficiently, that issues are identified and resolved quickly, and that VMware resources are not being wasted. Traditional approaches focus on recording and reporting discrete events, (e.g., CPU utilization exceeding a threshold) to identify a problem in a VMware environment. With these approaches, complex or subtle issues often go unnoticed and IT staff are inundated with alerts without guidance for prioritizing, interpreting or correcting them. In one touch, SIOS iQ identifies problems and recommends the best solutions, filtering out the noise and alert storms typical in traditional approaches.
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