 Hi, this is the host of the Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of GFR. Let's talk. And today we have with us once again, Dave Birmingham, director of customer success as Sios Technology. Dave, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, I'm glad to be here again. Thanks for having me. And today we are going to talk about high availability in state and local governments and education, or as we call it, SLED. If I ask you, if you look at state and local governments and education, first of all, they do a lot of different things, but we have very specific focus in today's discussion. Talk a bit about what systems or services they use that are kind of considered critical to the operations of these organizations. Yeah. So as you can imagine, you think about state and local government, and it's a huge organization. It's probably the biggest organization they're going to be. It encompasses a lot of different systems, a lot of different departments, and so forth. So we're going to kind of focus on some of the higher departments that are maybe business critical, right? So we think about state and local government, and I think about paying my taxes. 90% of my taxes go to support our education system, so the local school district. And within that school district is obviously very important that they are able to operate efficiently. So they have to maintain their student information systems that manage the grades, enrollments, and transcripts, and so forth. But more often than not, especially with COVID, you see people going to online classrooms. So there's learning management systems. I'm taking some classes this semester, where we're using something like Canvas or Blackboard or those types of systems where that system's offline, no one's learning. Class is not in session. So you can imagine those are business critical systems. But beyond the school system, I think about some other important functions of my state government or my local government. If I pick up the phone and I call 911, I expect someone to be on the other end to take that call, not only to be able to take the call, but to be able to efficiently dispatch services for whatever emergency might be ambulance, police, or whatnot. So communication and collaboration tools that are used by those emergency services are probably the most business critical, mission critical systems that a local government relies on. Beyond that, think about like any other corporation is financial management systems. You go to pay your taxes. All those systems need to be online. So budgeting, accounting, procurement, taxes. I'm just here in our local town. We just moved our headquarters from our local government from one building to the other. I think there was a miscue in mail delivery. And people were paying their taxes, being delivered to the wrong building. And a lot of people got late with notices. So that doesn't even have anything to do with necessarily computer systems being online. But that's all part of business continuity, disaster recovery is making sure all those systems flow, getting the mail together to the right location is all part of that business critical process that has to happen. So you need to take into consideration all those systems that make our local government function and make sure that they are highly available. Now, when I look at you, you do know, hey, which are the services which actually are considered critical and need high availability. How do state and local governments and education, they determine that these are the systems which are critical and if they need high availability for these systems and services, it's really no different than any, you know, any enterprise, they have to take a look at each and every system or service that they deliver and determine, you know, what happens if this service is offline, the system fails? What are the ramifications? And obviously, we talked about, you know, 911, that's life or death, right? You don't want to drop a phone call when someone needs an ambulance, so forth. So they really look at a couple of things, right? The dependency on a system or service, if there's some things that, you know, could be offline for a few hours and really no one would know the difference, how dependent are you? What is your tolerance for downtime? So figure that out. How often is a system is used? If you have, you know, an accounting system that is just used, you know, weekly, you know, then obviously high availability might not be, you know, that's first in line to, you know, receive high availability. Again, impact of the outage systems offline, what's the impact? What's, you know, the disruption? What does it do? It's a significant negative impact. Again, back to education system. If my canvas or Blackboard or whatever online learning system I'm using, is that offline? What does that mean? My, you know, people pay tuition to attend my university and they're not getting services. That's not, that impacts today's students, but also people looking to maybe choose your, you know, your college in the future. If you're not, you know, if you have bad, you know, bad press, that might impact future students as well. And then they over a cost, right? So there's, you can't put a price on, you know, the 911 service, right? It's life or death, but there's other services that, yeah, might be inconvenience, but what's the overall cost of that outage? And you want to minimize the cost of downtime. So, you know, that always will factor into the decision of whether or not to implement high availability for that system. So a combination of all those, the impact, the cost, the frequency of use, the dependence on the system, they all come together to help determine whether that system needs to be highly available or not. Can you talk about how do they choose, you know, once again, you did touch upon that, but a specific solution which makes more sense in their case. You know, once they determine a system needs to be highly available and they're trying to figure out what does that mean? What does that look like? They have to look at a couple of factors. Of course, the cost, right? So an AHA solution needs to be cost effective. You know, you can't spend a million dollars to save $100,000. That doesn't make sense. But, you know, so cost obviously is, you know, probably, you know, one of the most important factors. But there's other factors as well. Of course, why are you buying high availability is for redundancy. So is it reliable? Is it going to ensure that you have the availability that you're hoping to achieve? So whatever system you're implementing has to make sure you have the redundancy. High availability should detect failures, perform recovery actions all, you know, automatically to help you achieve, which is commonly called, you know, high availability starts at 99.99% availability, which is roughly less than five minutes of downtime per month. So you got to look at the redundancy. And of course, performance, you have to maintain just because the system's available, it's not performing up to specs, then that's not really considered available. So the AHA solution should be able to maintain high levels of performance, even under heavy workloads, or during failover scenarios. And I think about the school, you know, especially college where one week a year or one week a semester, students are picking their classes, they're online and rolling. So that system needs to be able to perform at that peak, you know, that time. So that leads to scalability, right? So the system needs to be scalable. And, you know, being highly available when no one's using it is one thing, but being highly available and scalable and perform it during that peak period of time is critical. So you need to make sure that performance is maintained and not the solution is scalable. And then finally, it needs to be able to integrate with the existing systems and infrastructure. So you look at 911 and the CAD systems, you know, call center, they, you know, whatever solution you have needs to work with the solution you have in place. So that's obviously a very important consideration as well. It needs to be able to integrate seamlessly with whatever solution that you're currently using. Can you share some use cases, you know, or the kind of customers that you have worked with in this sector? To come to mind, you know, we do a lot of work with education systems. And I was kind of referencing one of the universities that we've done business with is, you know, that student enrollment system, where again, going back to their concern was, you know, once a semester, everyone going for classes, they can't afford to have downtime. So they were looking for a solution that would eliminate the possibility of downtime during that enrollment period. So it was for, it was backend by SQL server. So they needed to implement a cluster, you know, SQL server fill over cluster instance, but they wanted to have redundancy across data centers. So not, not a single data center, they want to be able to withstand a failure of an entire data center. So they were implementing a sandless cluster solution with science data keeper to span data centers. So that high availability, not only at the application level at the server level, but also at the entire data center center level. The other solution that I've worked with is in that 911 space of the calls call center and CAD systems. So we work with an integrator that deploys CAD systems. And specifically this integrator, they have a very, say, unique or differentiated solution that allows different townships to communicate with each other. If you imagine you, your local town, you have a 911 dispatch, you have a local police force, you have a local fire force. However, you have, you know, you're only limited to the number of, you know, police cars or fire trucks that you have in your, you know, on your payroll. But what happens if you have multiple disasters, you commonly call upon the township next to you to assist. And that can sometimes be challenging because you don't have insight into what, you know, what services are currently available over there. So they have a solution as a CAD to CAD type solution where you have your call center can actually see their call center. So you have this partnership. And so you can actually dispatch police or fire or rescue from partner townships using this CAD to CAD system. And of course, that system needs to be highly available. So we've worked with this integrator to assure that their CAD to CAD system is online. Obviously this is one of the probably most business critical solutions that any local government could want to ensure is highly available. Is this call center or even this CAD to CAD type system. So we have some, you know, public case studies on that specific solution. But again, that's using our sandless clustering solution that allows you to build those clusters that span data centers like that. Dave, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic. And as I look forward to our next discussion. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Bye.