Cayan Protects Business Critical Applications With SIOS SANLess Clusters

SIOS Technology Corp. announced that Cayan, LLC, in payment solutions industry, is using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to protect its important Windows applications.

The company’s Genius customer engagement platform aggregates and integrates every conceivable transaction technology, payment type and customer program – both present and future – into a single platform. Customers include large online retailers.

“Our top priority is ensuring that our customers can complete transactions continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Paul Vienneau, CTO, Cayan.

When the company decided to move to a larger data center, they looked for a way to provide HA 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.

Cayan IT staff decided to use SANLess clusters. They built two-node clusters using standard Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software as an ingredient.

“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 add 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 set up a performance lab and tested the replication latency under heavy load. It ran great. The SIOS software met or exceeded our expectations. Implementation and ongoing administration is easy and we have had zero downtime since we implemented our SIOS SANLess clusters,” said Vienneau.

“Results achieved by Cayan are common across SIOS’ customer base,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology. “SIOS DataKeeper adds replication for disaster protection in SAN-based Windows clusters and enables SANLess clusters in Windows Server Failover Clustering environments where shared storage clusters are impossible or impractical.“