Easy-to-Manage High Availability Protection for Business Critical SQL Server
CayanTM is the leading provider of payment technologies that give businesses a competitive advantage. The company’s flagship Genius® Customer Engagement Platform® aggregates and integrates every conceivable transaction technology, payment type and customer program – both present and future – into a single platform. Cayan customers include some of the world’s largest online retailers, companies with no tolerance for downtime. “Our top priority is ensuring that our customers can complete transactions continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Paul Vienneau, Chief Technology Officer, Cayan.
The Challenge
When Cayan decided to move to a larger, state-of-the-art data center, they looked
for an affordable, easy-to-deploy way to provide high availability and disaster protection for the SQL Server database that their Genius platform and other important applications run on.
The company considered using a traditional shared storage cluster, but did not want
the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing a SAN storage array. As shared storage, a SAN would also introduce the risk of a single point of failure. “We needed a solution that could handle the large volume of transactions we process without slowing application performance,” said Vienneau.
The Solution
Cayan IT staff decided to use SIOS #SANLess clusters. They built two-node clusters using standard Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and simply added SIOS DataKeeperTM Cluster Edition software as an ingredient.
The SIOS software uses efficient, real time replication to synchronize local storage in the primary and remote cluster nodes, making them appear to WSFC as a virtual SAN.
“The SIOS software has very intuitive configuration wizards that enabled us to deploy our platform and applications in the SANless clusters quickly and easily,” said Vienneau. “Since SIOS DataKeeper is completely integrated with WSFC, our IT staff did not have to change system administration or deal with added complexity.”
Because the SANLess clusters use local storage, there is minimal performance overhead and fast application response times. “We were able to run our applications in the new SANLess cluster environment in our new data center in a full production mode before we put it
into full production. We stood up a performance lab and tested the replication latency under heavy load. It ran great,” said Vienneau.
The Results
The SIOS software provided the protection Cayan to protect its important Windows applications without the cost or performance impediments of a SAN. Since deploying their SANless clusters, Cayan has not experienced any downtime or data loss. “We are very pleased with the SIOS DataKeeper software. It met or exceeded our expectations,” said Vienneau. “Implementation and ongoing administration was easy and we have had zero downtime since we implemented our SIOS SANLess clusters.”