Zespri International Relies on SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

SIOS Technology Corp., a provider of software products that help IT optimize and protect business critical applications, announced that Zespri International (Zespri Group Limited), one of the largest SAP deployments in Microsoft Azure, relies on its DataKeeper Cluster Edition to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of Microsoft Azure environment for their SAP environment while delivering the service levels required of their business-critical applications.

“SIOS DataKeeper provided the configuration flexibility and HA protection we needed to deploy our business-critical SAP/SQL Server operations in Microsoft Azure,” said Andrew Goodin, global manager information services, Zespri.

The company relies on a large SAP and SQL Server infrastructure to manage its operations in more than 53 countries. Zespri began a strategic initiative to move their SAP operations to Microsoft Azure to leverage the flexibility and scalability of an Azure cloud environment. For this initiative, they needed to ensure that their business critical SAP and SQL Server applications would continue to meet the levels of service and HA their business demands.

They faced the challenge of delivering HA and disaster protection for their critical applications in a cloud, where shared storage failover clustering is not available.

“We needed a simple, cost-efficient solution that would protect critical SAP Central Services but would not add complexity to our move to Azure,” said Goodin.

The company’s IT consultant, Datacom recommended using DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to build SANless clusters in Azure. Zespri added DataKeeper to its Windows server failover clusters to enable them to work in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment. DataKeeper synchronizes local storage in cluster nodes located in different Microsoft Azure fault domains for disaster protection. The synchronized storage appears to WSFC as identical to a traditional SAN. Today, the Zespri infrastructure is one of the largest SAP deployments in Microsoft Azure worldwide comprising more than 32 nodes running on large SQL Server databases.

By providing the HA foundation needed to support business critical operations, DataKeeper software played a critical role in enabling Zespri to move to Microsoft Azure. With DataKeeper, Zespri was able to take advantage of scalability and flexibility of Microsoft Azure environment for their SAP environment while delivering the service levels required of their business-critical applications.