SIOS SANless Clusters Provide HA Protection Needed to Deploy SAP in Microsoft Azure for Zespri International

SOURCE: SIOS Technology Corp

The world’s largest marketer of kiwifruit, Zespri International, 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 to be successful, they needed to ensure that their business critical SAP and SQL Server applications would continue to meet the stringent levels of service and high availability their business demands.

They faced the challenge of delivering high availability 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 project critical SAP Central Services but would not add complexity to our move to Azure,” said Andrew Goodin, Global Manager Information Services, Zespri International.

The company’s IT consultant, Datacom recommended using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to quickly and easily build SANless clusters in Azure. Zespri added SIOS DataKeeper to its Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clusters to enable them to work in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment. SIOS 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 Microsoft SQL Server databases.

By providing the HA foundation needed to support business critical operations, SIOS DataKeeper software played a critical role in enabling Zespri to move to Microsoft Azure. “SIOS DataKeeper provided the configuration flexibility and high availability protection we needed to deploy our business-critical SAP/Microsoft SQL Server operations in Microsoft Azure,” said Goodin.

With SIOS DataKeeper, Zespri was able to take advantage of scalability and flexibility of Microsoft Azure environment for their SAP environment while delivering the stringent service levels required of their business-critical applications.

Author:

Jerry Melnick
President and CEO, SIOS Technology Corp.

Jerry is responsible directing the overall corporate strategy for SIOS Technology Corp. and leading the company’s ongoing growth and expansion. He has more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software markets. Before joining SIOS, he was CTO at Marathon Technologies where he led business and product strategy for the company’s fault tolerant solutions. His experience also includes executive positions at PPGx, Inc. and Belmont Research, where he was responsible for building a leading-edge software product and consulting business focused on supplying data warehouse and analytical tools. Jerry began his career at Digital Equipment Corporation where he led an entrepreneurial business unit that delivered highly scalable, mission critical database platforms to support enterprise-computing environments in the medical, financial and telecommunication markets. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Beloit College with graduate work in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Boston University.