Introduction
Companies no longer are to stick to a single site. They expand by dispersing the workloads between multiple locations in the same city, country, and even implement cross-continent setups to ensure High Availability for their mission-critical applications. Therefore, to ensure Business Continuity, StarWind introduces active-active Stretched Clustering support.
Problem
The stretched cluster, or multi-site clusters, are nothing new. However, the existing solutions featuring active-passive replication prove inefficient, leaving only 50% of the resources available for applications while the other half remains on standby. Furthermore, businesses need to match the uptime with their mission-critical workloads. With that being said, production environments should be able to avoid any impending outage to applications and services.
After looking carefully at this issue, active-active data access from multiple locations seems to be that magic wand that resolves the problem. In other words, the data must be mirrored so that each site would contain the entire actual data. So, in case an outage occurs in the city A, the IT infrastructure is not affected and keeps operating in its usual way thanks to the workload mirrored to the city B.
Solution
To resolve these challenges and ensure constant uptime for businesses’ applications and services, StarWind brings in the Stretched Clustering support. The IT infrastructure resources utilization rate reaches 100% since StarWind Stretched Clustering delivers active-active replicated shared storage. Moreover, organizations’ IT environments can effectively avoid any downtime due to Live Migration between the geographical locations.
As the result, their mission-critical applications and services remain always up and running no matter what outage hits one of the locations. To top that off, there is no added complexity to the cluster management. Existing management tools like StarWind Management Console, SCVMM, and 5nine Manager can be used.
Сonclusion
The support of Stretched Clustering allows organizations to avoid downtime and ensure true business continuity. IT infrastructure resources get utilized with the maximum efficiency while applications and services get maximum uptime. All of this together with convenient cluster management instruments makes StarWind a perfect choice for ensuring availability for mission-critical applications.
