 Hi, this is Yoosupin Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of T3M, our topic of this month. And the topic of this month is high availability disaster recovery. And today we have with us Jason Huff, Linux product owner at Scios Technology. Jason, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Swabnam. Good to be here. How do you see the evolution of users or use cases related to HADR as the adoption of cloud technologies is growing? You know, what we see, we see more and more companies are moving their workloads to the cloud, right? And therefore we see an escalation in the complexity of technology, but we also see an increase in the severity of threats to these IT infrastructures. There's things like resource starvation, natural disasters, power grid failures and a slew of new and random disasters. And, you know, it makes it really difficult to insulate the whole enterprise and even more so when all of these components are running in the cloud. And, you know, despite everyone's best efforts, there's still human errors, right? And that causes significant downtime. And when you look at the things that we did to solve those problems last year, we need to update those to handle this year or next year's unprecedented outages. All of this makes it really critical to work with a vendor who has focused on high availability for many, many years, a vendor who has firsthand experience with finding solutions to these random disasters. The reason is users are predominantly looking for solutions that provide high levels of protection, but they also want to reduce the complexity that are involved. And this is really, really true when you're talking about SAP, HANA, SQL Server, Oracle, these big, huge, complex databases, which become essential to the business ops. You're going to need more than just cloud native basic tools. You need high availability. And so that's that's really our focus at Sios. The other thing is system admins, they're changing, right? In terms of their skills and their knowledge. And they're being redirected to focus their expertise in other critical areas, because the expectation for these cloud technologies is that they're simple, right? They're, they're user friendly, they're intuitive, they're easily accessible. So one example of how we're meeting this demand at Sios is we're working on streamlining our current fellow Vringen, and we're adding additional self-help tools and mechanisms so that when problems arise, you know, these customers will be better equipped to troubleshoot and restore their their data and applications. When we look at cloud, it seems like a magical place, right? Once you move your applications there, hey, it's all done. You don't have to worry about security. You don't have a backup, but reality is different. They do offer, you know, an environment, but you know, users are still responsible for a lot of things, though they do make things easier. But when it comes to high availability or DR, does cloud make it easier or makes it more complicated for users? We deal with the most complicated and the most essential applications in the entire industry. And whether they're on-prem or they've moved to the cloud, you know, application HA and DR is just intrinsically complicated for any application to operate. Everything in that IT stack has to be operational. It has to be compatible. It has to be available. And every cloud provider is different, right? So providing HA and DR is a little bit different in each one. Also, more and more companies are actually using more than one environment in the cloud, right? Multi-cloud. And that adds additional complexity. It adds the need for additional knowledge from these folks. But the applications in the cloud, they're still vulnerable to unexpected outages. They're still vulnerable to unplanned downtime, just as they are in a data center. But in some respects, you have a little less control in the cloud, right? So moving to the cloud, it's not the simple answer. These cloud availability SLAs, they usually just cover the hardware. So they can't provide HA and DR for these stateful applications, not without degrading performance, all right? So many HA clustering solutions, for instance, they can't fell over across cloud regions. They can't fell over across availability zones. If that further limits the level of DR they can provide. You might say, well, is open source clustering? Is that the answer? No. That requires highly complicated scripting. And that's also prone to human error and failure. The manual steps required to ensure that these complicated ERPs or databases to fell over, it's really complicated. And it's also extremely order dependent, right? So these IT teams, they become hesitant to perform regular maintenance and fell over testing. So to summarize all that, it really depends on the application. If it's not essential, then maybe the cloud is enough. But if that application is critical to your day to day operations, then you need highly automated HA clustering in order to protect it. Is HA DR needed for cloud workload? Because as we discussed, cloud does take care of a lot of things. So talk about that. It does. But it's still absolutely necessary. That's a, like you mentioned, it's a common misconception that can get folks in trouble. Because no cloud vendor is going to have all the tools, all the software and all the applications that you need baked into their cloud infrastructure, at least not in a way that your enterprise can consume. So you're going to, you're going to migrate your workloads to the cloud, right? As infrastructure, as a service offerings, that's going to require someone or something to protect those workloads and make sure that they are highly available. So when a failure happens in the cloud, your application needs intelligent recovery of the failed components, the systems, the application resources, the infrastructure components and all their dependencies. HA software, that's your first line of defense for identifying and remediating application failures. With these types of monitoring tools, a failure can be detected and remediated by the software even before users see an impact. So HA software, it helps you reduce and potentially eliminate the downtime even required for things like upgrades, patching, rolling preventative maintenance. You can use the software's, you know, switch over and fail over capabilities. So a standby server, you can actively patch it, update it, test it, and then promote it to the active availability node. And all of that just, it ensures your critical systems, they're running on the most latest and greatest release. But you're also minimizing the risk of doing the upgrade, right? How are you folks making it easier for users? Because once again, cloud is complicated. When you look at Kubernetes, all those things, it becomes even more complicated. So and that complexity is not going away. What we have to do is to make sure that customers are prepared to deal with this complexity, lower the barrier of entity. So talk about what is Sios doing, how your solutions are helping users so they can embrace these HADR practices without, you know, getting worried or overwhelmed with the complexity. And as we talked about a minute ago, in the cloud, Sios clusters do fail across those regions in those availability zones. And that helps users achieve that maximum disaster recovery protection. And for customers who want to deploy multiple clusters, our LifeKeeper product, it has a feature that allows you to create multiple identical clusters using consistent predefined settings, integrated best practices. So customers can achieve that four nines of availability and disaster protection for all of their workloads, whether they're running on-prem in the cloud or some hybrid environment. Here at Sios, we always build products with the customers ease of use in mind. For instance, in our most recent LifeKeeper release for Linux, we introduced a new feature to support SAP HANA multi-target. And this enhancement gives users the ability and the automation behind high availability and DR protection for HANA databases. So customers can extend a traditional two-node failover cluster to include additional nodes in DR locations without needing complicated scripting, without all of those administrative tasks that are prone to errors. LifeKeeper orchestrates all of this. It orchestrates the failover, it manages the replication to the DR site. So all of that's hands-free recovery from any types of faults, failures or disasters. Let's talk specifically about cloud. What kind of solutions do you folks have for cloud users? We offer high availability for cloud users, like folks using AWS EC2 and Azure. One of the advantages in our solution is just the sheer scope of applications, operating systems, infrastructure environments, all of which we support. So it's one single solution. It handles a customer's high availability and disaster recovery protection in any combination of physical, virtual, cloud, hybrid cloud, all of those infrastructures. We also protect those essential databases, applications and ERPs such as SQL Server, SAP S4 HANA, Oracle, MaxDB, and many, many more. The MSPs that we work with, the managed service providers, they really value our ability to provide a consistent and reliable experience, regardless of whether customers are in a Windows or a Linux environment. So kind of to summarize, at Sios, we continue to seek more ways to build a better experience for users to manage their HA and DR by reducing complex manual processes. Ultimately, our goal is to enable users to leverage the power of the cloud without the risks. Jason, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show to talk more about what Sios is doing in this space. Thank you. Yeah, that would be great. Thanks very much, Swapnil.