– Jerry Melnick, COO of SIOS Technology, says:
Epicure Selections is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to easily and cost-efficiently provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. SANLess Clustering
Epicure, Canada’s leading direct sales company, sells healthy, easy-to-prepare food products through a network of over 16,000 consultants.
Epicure relies on two websites for its critical business operations. Its public website provides product, company, and consultant enrolment information to customers and people interested in becoming a consultant. The internal website provides consultants with important product information and enables them to place orders.
The company uses two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition—one for each website running on a single server. “Our websites are vital to our business,” said Russell Born, Senior Network Infrastructure Administrator at Epicure.
As the company grew and expanded its products and services, the Epicure IT department needed to update and protect its business-critical websites from downtime. It decided to move both websites from a third-party hosted facility to its on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services. “The business is growing and we needed to ensure our website delivers an excellent user experience for our customers and consultants,” said Born.
As part of this update, Epicure wanted an efficient, cost-effective way to provide high availability and disaster protection for both websites while continuing to run them on two instances of SQL Server Standard Edition. “We didn’t want the added expense of moving to SQL Server Enterprise Edition if we could provide HA and DR with Standard Edition,” Born said.
Using SIOS SANLess clustering software, Epicure IT staff created a two-node cluster in an active-passive failover configuration that enables each SQL instance to failover independently. One cluster node is in the on-premises data center and the second node is in an instance of the AWS EC2 cloud. Epicure IT staff created the SIOS SANLess clusters and configured them using the software’s intuitive graphical user interface.
The SIOS software provides Epicure with an easy, cost-efficient way to provide HA and DR protection for its business-critical SQL Server applications without the complexity of building out a remote DR site or purchasing costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses. “The SIOS software has allowed us to create a hybrid solution providing additional cost savings of running on-premises with the reliability and flexibility of running in the cloud,” said Born. “Knowing that a website outage will result in an automatic failover allows our IT Team to focus their attention on other priorities to strengthen our business.”
About the Author:
Jerry Melnick
COO, SIOS Technology Corp.
Jerry Melnick (jmelnick@us.sios.com) is responsible for defining corporate strategy and operations at SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SIOS SAN and #SANLess cluster software. He more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software industries. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Beloit College with graduate work in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Boston University.
