Empowering HA Cluster Administrators with SIOS Technology’s Aaron West

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. I had a great pleasure of being joined by Aaron West.

Aaron is sales engineer with s os. How you doing Aaron? Hi there.

I'm doing very well. Thank you. And thanks for having me here today.

Of course. Absolutely. Um, tell us a little bit about sios.

I mean, you all have been around for a while, so there's a lot of folks who do know you about you in case, uh, folks don't, then, then we're gonna get into an announcement that you just made recently, but start with a little bit about the company. Sure. So, um, we're a company that specializes in high availability, um, specifically around application availability.

Uh, we also, um, we also have products around storage availability and block replication. We've been doing this for a very, very long time. Um, so, you know, we've been around for ages, as you say, over 20 years in the industry.

And, um, our solutions cover both Linux and Windows. Very good. A lot of both out there in the world for sure, and always looking for more help with it.

Uh, talk about the, the exciting announcement that just occurred. Absolutely. So, um, I'm, I'm glad to announce that we've, uh, released our latest, um, version, which is 9 8 1, and as part of that release, we've really taken things forward by releasing our new web management console.

Um, now this is just for Linux in this release, although there will be a, um, a web management console in the future for our, our Windows product as well. I don't have a release date for that yet, but it's something to look forward to, but those, using Linux can, can take advantage of this now and, um, and see where we're moving with this. Fantastic.

So tell us, tell us some of the benefits or, or some of the things that we can do now that you have sort of web management console, if you will, in, in one place. You know, where you have a lot, I'm sure there's a lot of information that it's vital to know about, but it's hard to pull it all together. Yeah, absolutely.

So, uh, I think the key, one of the key things is, is moving to a, a web management console rather than the, uh, Java based administration application that we've always used at cis. Um, it basically means that it's a lot easier to, to develop and to build upon that as a platform. So for this release, it's really been about making something that's easy to look at, provides all the features that you would currently expected from our existing management, um, platform, and, uh, also puts that across in a very simplified, easy to use way.

What, what would be some kind of example, use cases where someone is, it is something you're gonna hang in the operation center? Is it something someone's gonna sit in front of to go diagnose or understand events that are occurring? Absolutely.

So, um, the obvious thing is the initial configuration of your clusters. It can all be done through the web management console in a very simple stepwise fashion. It'll take you through the steps, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

If you stop partway through, you can walk away, come back, pick up from where you left off. So, um, you're not stuck in a situation of having to, uh, understand everything about deploying a cluster straight away. Um, in addition to that, once you've got your clusters configured, management is made very, very simple.

You know, it's a web management console, so you can simply log in from a, your desktop, your tablet, even your phone. Um, it looks good and great on on all of those platforms. Um, from there you'll be able to handle things like failover and also see the state of the system.

So as part of that, we've included a traffic light system. So things are shown as green when they're healthy and operational and things will be shown as red when there's some, uh, issue at play and you need to investigate a bit further. Um, I think the other thing that I really like about the platform is it's covered in tool tips everywhere.

So it explains what these, uh, these features are, what, what different, you know, uh, statuses are, and you can very easily, uh, click around on the tool tips and understand what you're looking at, You know, um, I don't think anybody's ever said Linux and is simple and it, that hasn't changed. Um, but particularly when you get into cluster cluster management, bail over high availability, um, all of those kind of issues, you know, that takes some pretty specialized skills, but we're adding new people to workforce all the time. So it sounds like the ability not only to see what's happening, but you know, help me understand what it means is really Important.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the burden on your typical day-to-day, IT admin these days is, is growing. Um, and I feel sorry for a lot of these guys.

You know, back in the old days, systems were quite simple. You know, you provide the, the basic IT infrastructure and, you know, businesses small to medium, were typically running on things like spreadsheets and things like this. Whereas now a small to medium business is moving towards having, you know, SAP in their environment.

And as they have these more critical applications deployed and the bus business begins to rely upon them, they then need to become highly available. And also they need to think about disaster recovery. 'cause no longer can you, you know, withstand downtime.

So the burden on the i on the average IT guy in a company is definitely growing, that they're expected to know a lot more about different systems and have a, a wider skillset. A web management console like we provide hopefully takes some of the burden away from them by simplifying the whole thing and meaning you don't actually have to be a clustering expert in order to, uh, you know, manage and look after a system. Very good.

Um, I'm curious to, um, one of the things about managing Linux clusters is that, you know, you're always having challenges with capacity, uh, workloads, the kind of applications that you're deploying on those, uh, different environments. 'cause those things don't stay static, right? It's not like set it up, configure it, just kinda let it hang out there and people will use it.

You, you have a lot of variability going on that you've gotta really understand when something's happening. What are the conditions around it? Um, how, how does the web console help with something like that?

Well, I think it takes you away from the traditional way of understanding these things, which is looking at log files, right? Um, you know, many a Linux admin will be sat at a terminal, um, you know, grepping a log file looking for statuses and, and trying to understand what's going on. I mentioned earlier that we've got the, uh, the traffic light system, and I think that that's a, a really nice way of getting that across.

You can now look at your cluster in a visual fashion, um, so you can see it on screen and you can pick up those statuses, uh, from, from the actual management console itself. It'll show you if something's working, it'll highlight if there's a problem, and hopefully it'll highlight, you know, something that enables you to sort of solve a problem before it becomes too serious. Right?

So if you can see that there's latency, say between the two nodes and you can pick up upon that before it causes a, a false failover or something along those lines, then you can investigate what's the cause of that, um, and solve the problem before it actually becomes a problem. It seems like also having the mobile, the i, the tablet, the mobile other interfaces are, you know, problems never happen when you're at work, right? It's always in the middle of the movie at the movie theater or somewhere.

Absolutely. It seems, you know, every system administrator or operations personal, uh, person certainly understands that, but being able to get access to that information very quickly and easily, so, you know, if you need to respond, would be a vital importance. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't imagine that lots of administrators would be sat there entirely administering their cluster from their phone.

I mean, absolutely you could do that if you wanted to. Um, but the status and being able to view what's going on from anywhere I think is exceptionally important because, um, obviously they can take an action from their phone and it's fully functional, but even just to know what's going on, so, you know, you have to, you know, jump onto the VPN or return to the office to get a, uh, you know, a problem resolved, um, is also extremely important. And then how you handle those statuses, you know, we can set up potentially alerts or, um, have it monitored in, in other systems within your, your organization.

Very good. Now, now this can work for both on-prem as well as in the cloud. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean that's a, a really good feature I think, uh, of what we provide. So our high availability solution covers, you know, Linux and Windows as we mentioned earlier, but also it's suitable for on-prem cloud deployments as well. Uh, and it looks the same wherever you deploy it, which is a really nice way of, uh, of, of having a solution because all too often these days you're an Amazon expert or you are a Azure expert, um, and understanding how things work across different platforms can be, you know, again, it's one of those burdens that's on the average it, it administrator, right?

Um, but our solution allows you a common HA solution that looks the same wherever you deploy it works the same wherever you deploy it. Uh, and I think that's one of the real benefits if you're looking at sort of, you know, having stuff stretched between on-prem and the cloud or maybe even multi clouds, It seems like too, the benefit of being able to look, look at all of that, right? Not just at a single part of it element of a time.

'cause of oftentimes, you know, a distributed cloud application might be talking to a database or an application located in your data center, or it's distributed in multi-cloud fashion. So it, uh, could be a hindrance just if you can get the window into one of those environments, but by being able to see all of it now you can trace down what's going on. Yeah.

And we are also integrated into those environments. So, you know, when, when we're working with Amazon, we are working with things that you used to route 53 EIP PS routing tables to get client access traffic to, you know, the active node. And the same with when we are working in Azure or other, um, hyperscaler cloud environments, we tie in using our application recovery kits to those environments, you know, directly.

Good. Um, now is this delivered as a SaaS, as a, as a cloud-based application? Is this something people can install in their own data center or both?

No, it's, it's absolutely something you install. So it, it will typically be running on the same nodes that, uh, uh, uh, form the cluster itself. So, you know, typically you'll have say, two node cluster for something like, uh, a SQL server, um, and both of those nodes will host and run the web management console along with the actual clustering software itself.

However, the software can connect to other nodes. So, you know, the idea is that as we go forward, it becomes more of a single pane of glass. You'll be able to view your entire infrastructure through, through just connecting to one of your active nodes.

Uh, interesting. Just kinda use any, any node, at least in the future. Any node is an entree way into all of it.

That's it. Very interesting. So you mentioned, um, the configuration of it, of the web console, uh, web web management feature, uh, earlier it sounds like just, uh, does it come with pre-configured with any monitoring or any uh, um, kind of red and green lights, or do you start out kind of with a canvas that you build what you want?

Yeah, I mean, the basics of of monitoring is all there. So once you, once you deploy a cluster and actually create that, that cluster, that's gonna show up in the web management console and, uh, you know, different recovery kits that are being used. So these are our specific, uh, way of interacting with different applications or platforms.

We have our, our arcs, our application recovery kits. Those kits will each have their own, um, their own warnings and statuses that are then shown. And, uh, you know, that's what I'm talking about having the traffic light system, whether it's green or red.

So if you, for example, you've got, um, you know, uh, an an IP address that's, uh, you know, being moved between instances, you could check the status of that IP address. If it's a, um, if it's a storage volume that's, uh, replicated between instances, you could check the status of the storage and see if it's healthy and working as it should be. Very good.

So folks wanna get their hands on this, maybe get a demo or, or do a free trial. How do they do that? Well, all of our, all of our documentation and information is available on our website and, and, you know, know it's not behind paywalls and, uh, complicated logins.

So you can go and check that out. Um, you can also book a demo right there on our website, so please do, we'd love to talk to you and, uh, introduce you to our, um, simplified HA solution. Very good.

com? Correct. com.

Okay, very good. com/demo-request and or free dash trial and get you straight to it or you can get there just from the main page. Very good.

Um, anything else that you wanna add, Aaron? Just to say that this version isn't just about our web management console, it also comes with more platform support. So, um, you know, the actual product has moved forward, not just the addition of the web management console.

So you'll see newer versions of, uh, of Linux are now supported. So check that out too. Okay.

Part of a broader kind of up upgrade too. That's Right. Very nice.

Well, thanks. It's been a pleasure talking with you and I appreciate all the helpful information. Congratulations on the, uh, launch and, uh, look forward to the windows and versions sometime down the road.

Thanks for joining us. Hope we get to talk again soon. Thank you.

You bet. Take care, Aaron.