Different Clouds Don't Like To Cluster...

Had another interesting cloudy discussion last week with SIOS – one of ITs better kept secrets, certainly in the UK.

Much of that is down to the sensitivity of what it does and who it does it for. The vendor deals with HA  – high availability (and disaster recovery) – and companies aren’t too keen to admit that their products and services, data and applications aren’t necessarily always available. Like a bank saying – well, we might have your money still in our reserves, if our latest investments haven’t gone wotsits up. Of course, that does happen, but they don’t actually tell you…

Where the HA scenario has got especially interesting for SIOS – and its customers – is with the advent of t’cloud (as we call it in Yorkshire, where we see many). HA in a one CSP scenario is not straightforward – HA was always an OnPrem scenario, even when failover time was so long that you could go on holiday while it was happening. At least you could see it happening in front of you (assuming you were in the machine room/data centre and not on holiday). But within the cloud there is no shared storage. And what if you are putting your golden data/apps eggs in several cloudy baskets – say AWS, Azure and Google. Now they are not interested in ensuring that if and when their service fails, then another CSPs kicks in! So, what SIOS provides is HA clustering regardless of app/data, OS or CSP/server location. It can emulate physical disk resource to simulate those physical clusters across resource and cluster workload.

Of course, what this means is that no two customer scenarios will be the same. Good luck chaps! But seriously, in the world of “value add” it gives partners enormous flexibility in managing those scenarios and providing that value add. Put it this way – with my old IT hat on, I would not want to attempt a DIY alternative to what SIOS offers. Another side effect of the SIOS approach is that it can save massively on licensing costs, as you’re paying for less physical resource.

Looking forward to hopefully seeing some of this tech in action in the future, so watch this space!