 We work with any industry that has a system that is highly critical to the success of the business. Hi, this is your host, Abhinav Hartyan. Welcome to another episode of TFLS Talk. And today we have with us once again, Margaret Hoogland, VP of Global Sales and Marketing at Syos Technology. Margaret, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me back, Swap. It's good to be back. And today's theme is high availability at airports. And this is a topic that we can all relate to, all of us frequent and business travelers. We know the pains that we sometimes go through at airports. But before we talk about high availability for airports, can you just explain what exactly do we mean by high availability here? So high availability, we provide application high availability, which is very specific. Customers sometimes put their application in the cloud and they get an SLA for high availability and they think that they're done. In fact, the cloud is providing infrastructure high availability. And so sometimes customers come to us because they've had a situation where their application stops working in the cloud and their cloud VM has continued to operate just fine. The cloud vendor has met their SLA commitment and they're puzzled as to what's missing. They need application level, high availability to cover all of the software driven reasons for a failure in a high availability environment. And by high availability, I mean 99.99% uptime for the application. So the critical applications that customers, businesses rely on are where our market is. SAP SQL server, HANA, Oracle, these big systems that run multiple different important systems within an organization that when they go down, they cause disruption, delay, and they're very, very costly. So that's where we work and that's where the clustering that we provide comes in. In the context of airports, how important or critical high availability is for airport operations? As you can imagine in an airport, everything is deadline-driven and a lot of the activities that happen in an airport are dependent on one another. So if one system is late, delayed, fails, many other things happen in a domino effect. And so all of the systems in an airport work together. And so we are used in a variety of applications and databases. For example, baggage handling systems, card swipers for access control, video surveillance monitoring systems. We are in a validated milestone, makes X protect software, which is a surveillance camera management tool. We also protect in the big board, the arrivals and departures system that everybody relies on. First thing you look at when you go into an airport. So Psyos is protecting systems in over 100 airports around the world, both large international and regional airports in a wide variety of use cases. Now, if you look at airports, they run and manage a wide range of systems. Which of the systems really need high availability? Any kind of system that requires high availability, they're typically running on SQL server, SAP HANA, SAP systems, the Oracle database. Psyos protects both systems running in the cloud, on-premises and in hybrid cloud environments. Some customers put these systems either on-premises with a node or a disaster recovery site in the cloud or they run them in the cloud and they want a special disaster recovery location on-premises. Psyos uniquely covers all of that. You can set up the configuration that you choose, both in a Windows and in a Linux environment. So some customers like to use a lot of applications run on SQL server, for example, with an application running on the SQL environment. Psyos will protect that SQL environment and give the customers the choice of either running Windows server failover clustering that comes with their Windows server. We add the ability to run in the cloud without the need for shared storage, which is a requirement of Windows server failover clustering. And it can be quite complex to do so in the cloud. And Psyos allows customers to run their systems on-premises or in the cloud in a Samless environment using local storage. It makes Windows server failover clustering think that it's a shared storage environment. This allows customers to use SQL server standard edition. They save 70% of their SQL licensing that way. We also will support SQL Express for customers with environments like a video camera where you have a lot of small SQL instances that you need to protect. So it's quite a wide range of use cases and applications that we protect. In a SAP HANA environment, one of our key differentiators is that we provide application recovery kits. So if you think of the complexity involved in taking a SQL server, sorry, a HANA database and detecting a failure, moving it over to a secondary server and starting up all of its processes, A-S-C-S-E-R-S, all of the supporting services in the correct order, that's quite an undertaking. And customers without Psyos have to manually figure out how to script all of that. We have these application recovery kits for all of the major applications. And we have one that you can use to customize to an application that might be very specific. You plug that into your Psyos environment and we handle all of that. And that means that your configuration is easier, your failover is more reliable. When it does failover, it will operate in the best practices that are required by that application, that SAP best practice or SQL server best practice or Oracle or whatever your maybe airline specific requirement is. I don't even want to think about it, but what would happen if there is a downtime at an airport? Imagine you go to the airport and the baggage handling system is delayed. Now you may not make your connecting flight that baggage may end up in the wrong place in the wrong time. If your flight gets redirected, you may end up in a city far away from your baggage. So you think baggage handling isn't that critical an application when in fact, when you think of the consequences, it is quite critical. If the arrivals and departure board aren't available, if anybody who's walked into the airport knows that gates change quickly, departure times are delayed. And if you don't know that from that board, chaos can happen very, very quickly. So those are some of the critical applications. Another example would be access control systems. There's so much security in airports they need to know who came and went through every door and having one of those systems fail for some period of time would automatically lock the door, but it might not allow the security people to see who came and went through that door in a given timeframe. So that's a serious potential security lapse. You did touch upon that briefly earlier, but I want to go a bit deeper, talk a bit about how does iOS technologies and solutions help airports with their high availability strategies and needs. Good question. So we run the application or the database on a server that's connected to a secondary server, sometimes multiple secondary servers. And they are clustered, so they operate as a unit. Our software will detect any potential failure from the network to the storage, to the hardware, to the operating system and the application itself through the full stack. And if that our software detects that there is a failure, it will move the operation of that application over to a secondary server. It'll bring it online in compliance with the application's vendors best practices, and it will make sure that that failover anything connected to the primary server is now connected to the secondary server and operation continues automatically within moments. So the end users don't experience a serious downtime incident, the data is moved over and it's a continuation of operation in a very elegant way. Is it possible for you to give some examples or use cases of airports leveraging your technologies and solutions? We have several large international airports that use silos to protect their baggage handling systems. So as you might imagine, if baggage handling doesn't operate for even a short period of time, people might miss a connecting flight, they might be rerouted to a different city and therefore their baggage is now going to the wrong city. It becomes quite chaotic and very expensive for the airline and the airport if that system goes down. Security is very tight in airports and so card swipers need to detect and track everybody who entered or exited a specific door, for example. If that system goes down, the security may be breached surveillance cameras. If the surveillance camera is offline for any period of time. Again, in an airport, that takes on a far greater level of criticality than say a small store or something. The airports have such high expectations for both the time that is required, their lack of tolerance for downtime and for the specific applications that are running. Another example is the arrivals and departure boards. If the arrival and departure board isn't readily apparent to everyone when they walk into the airport, that's setting everyone at disease and everyone's sort of concerned if the board is down for any length of time, flights get moved to different gates, they get delayed, there people don't know when arrivals will come in. You can just imagine how difficult that is. So even a brief period of downtime for those systems is very costly both in time, confusion, customer satisfaction and actual cost. And so those systems are almost always run on a Psyos environment. So ticketing and reservations are another good example. The ticketing and reservation systems, if they are running on a database system like SQL Server, again, it's pretty obvious how quickly things can become very disruptive and very difficult if the ticketing system goes down. So many organizations use Psyos for those systems. Of course, we have run the whole series on how other industries need high availability and how Psyos help them. But just tell me, tell our audience beyond airports what other industries are there that rely heavily on Psyos for their high availability strategies? We work with any industry that has a system that is highly critical to the success of the business. So manufacturing process control systems, for example, manufacturing systems like SAP, ERP systems that are running an entire organization. They run the SAP application and or their HANA database on Psyos high availability clustering solutions so that they can make sure that those don't fail. Healthcare is another one. If healthcare patient record management systems fail or 911 emergency calls, our systems are down, the consequences can be deadly. And so any system that has that level of criticality where they need to be up and running 24-7, 365, they run them on Psyos. Margaret, thank you so much for taking time out and talk about this topic. And I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Thank you Swap, I appreciate it.