Moving Mission-Critical Applications into the Cloud
Application Continuity Cloud
In an effort to test the viability and size of the market for bundling HA/DR with targeted mission critical applications (targeted ISVs) and deploy them into the public cloud (Amazon), SIOS embarked on its next phase of cloud research referred to “Application Continuity Cloud”.
SIOS’s Application Continuity Cloud (ACC) consists of the SteelEye Protection Suite (SPS) including both the LifeKeeper and DataKeeper products. SPS will be enabled with a RESTFUL API which facilitates integration with third party application and 3rd party web application GUI interfaces. The core focus of the Application Continuity Cloud is the mission-critical application. APC provides organizations with the ability to deliver third party web applications into public cloud environments with an integrated level of application protection (High Availability and Disaster Recovery) that increases public SLAs to levels required by large Enterprises.
An initial deployment of Application Continuity Cloud will be done with SugarCRM, the world’s leading provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, for sales force automation and customer support deployed on demand or on site.
SIOS and SugarCRM are bundling the SIOS cloud-enabled high availability and disaster recovery technology (LifeKeeper and DataKeeper) and its Cloud deployment/management technology (CloudStation) with SugarCRM’s Pro and Enterprise offerings. The combined offering is referred to as “HA for SugarCRM” and provides customers with cloud & HA/DR-ready images for deployment.
Other target mission-critical applications include wordpress, drupal, and Joomla for web CMS infrastructure, and a host of ecommerce applications such as Magento as shown above.
SIOS, SugarCRM, and Amazon
The following virtual panel summarizes initial discussions around this approach. Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelist for Amazon Web Services; Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM; and Jim Kaskade, GM & Chief of Cloud SIOS Technolgy came together for an insightful discussion on moving mission-critical applications into the cloud.
SIOS studied how enterprises could protect mission-critical applications in the public cloud, while satisfying the most stringent security and availability requirements at a fraction of traditional data center investments.
The assumption is that the emerging Cloud model is a transforming paradigm for the IT industry and has reached a critical stage – “crossing the chasm” to mainstream adoption. The team is investigating customer demand for public cloud high availability, public cloud based real-time data replication, public cloud based disaster recovery, and specific use-cases for mission-critical applications protected using the above technologies for building public cloud HA and DR mirrors/clusters.
