Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Sarah Thompson of SIOS at a local Starbucks in Las Vegas for a product demonstration. With the impressive title of “Chief of Cloud,” Sarah was well-positioned to showcase her company’s innovative cloud-powered high availability and disaster recovery solution.
Using her MacBook running CentOS, Sarah employed Xen and Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager to operate several virtual machines representing the web, application, and database layers of a SugarCRM setup. Each virtual machine was equipped with the new SIOS CloudStation product. Through a user-friendly web interface, she configured CloudStation to replicate the virtual machine’s state to an Amazon EC2 instance located in a user-selected region.
Once the system was operational, Sarah demonstrated how she could intentionally shut down the local virtual machines while ensuring the application continued to function. The demo highlighted an impressively short Recovery Point Objective (RPO), allowing for changes made mere seconds before the database was terminated to remain accessible through the cloud-based virtual mirror. Sarah guided me through various failure and recovery scenarios, which were quite remarkable.
This demonstration serves as an excellent illustration of the cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) solutions I have been discussing with my audiences over the past couple of years. Once set up, CloudStation can seamlessly switch operations from local environments to the cloud, transition between cloud regions, or even migrate between different cloud providers. It also functions as a migration tool, often referred to as Physical to Virtual (P2V) or Physical to Cloud (P2C).
For more insights, you can check out this other blog post here. Additionally, here is a trusted source on this topic. For those looking for community advice, this Reddit thread offers excellent resources.
— Michael;
Modified 2/11/2021 – To enhance your reading experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original entry.
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