Run your Open-Source IT Services with Confidence

Open-source applications have seen a rapid rise in popularity, and today they’re often used by businesses to deliver important IT services.   Are you using open-source applications and databases to run your IT services?  One of the challenges you might be faced with is how to make these services highly available and resilient – to avoid unplanned downtime.  This requires an enterprise solution designed to provide high availability and resiliency that can deliver the always-on experience your end users expect.

Veritas InfoScale is a proven solution that does exactly that. It will help you deliver highly available and resilient IT services deployed using open-source applications and database management systems. InfoScale has several features and benefits that help ensure your open-source IT services are delivering a smooth and predictable user experience, and this blog will give you an overview of how the overall solution works.

Figure 1. InfoScale high availability and resiliency features work seamlessly with open-source solutions

High Availability

Open-source applications are often used to deploy IT services that are just as important as services delivered using commercial software solutions.  Making sure IT services designed with open-source technology have the same level of high availability is one of the key benefits InfoScale provides.  It does this by providing features such as:

• Advanced system and application monitoring using an Intelligent Monitoring Framework that provides instant event-based fault detection (using a Kernel driver) to support any RPO/RTO requirement you have

• High availability agents that work with nearly any type of application.  InfoScale offers both a general-use agent as well as some agents custom-developed to integrate with specific applications and databases (ex: PostgreSQL)

• Application clustering and support for multiple highly available deployment architectures

All these features work together to improve both the availability and performance of your open-source IT services.  Figure 2 is an example of how you can use InfoScale to support an open-source database in a clustered configuration to make it highly available in the cloud, with the additional benefit of improving performance using intelligent data caching.  In this example, InfoScale also provides the enterprise-grade storage management layer with a clustered file system used by the database for parallel access to the data volumes provisioned using high-performance shared storage.   

Figure 2. InfoScale manages an open-source database in a highly available cluster configuration in the cloud

So that’s an example of a database running in a highly available configuration, but what about a complete IT service? InfoScale has this covered too with a feature called Virtual Business Service (VBS).   It enables you to manage multi-tier applications as single consolidated entities. Using VBS, you can completely automate the recovery or migration of a complex multi-tier IT service – in cloud, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments – which helps simplify operations and eliminate downtime.

Figure 3. Easily manage multi-tiered IT services with InfoScale

Enterprise Storage Management

Having a robust storage management solution is essential for optimizing performance and eliminating unplanned downtime.  InfoScale’s storage management stack is fully software-defined and platform-agnostic, and it provides advanced functionality for your IT services:

• InfoScale’s Cluster File System enables parallel data access for application clusters and delivers better security, performance, and resiliency than NFS-based storage.  Intelligent data caching can further improve performance by caching hot data on a fast storage tier

• With a feature called Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS), you can create high-performance shared storage pools without the need for physically shared storage.  This provides better resource utilization and can also noticeably improve application performance

• With InfoScale’s integrated replication functionality, you can create geographically dispersed resiliency for your applications using HADR topologies that can support any RPO or RTO

InfoScale’s storage management and high availability services work together to provide a very unique solution that manages all the system and application components and their dependencies, so your IT services are highly available with optimized performance. Figure 4 is an example of how you can use InfoScale to provide high availability, improved performance, and enterprise-grade shared storage for an open-source database.

Figure 4. InfoScale high availability with parallel access clustered storage and intelligent data caching

Summary

Open-source solutions have become a mainstream option for providing a variety of different IT services.  This is why it’s more important than ever to have a proven solution in place to support the availability and resiliency characteristics your IT services need to deliver a smooth, predictable, and always-on end-user experience.  InfoScale is that proven solution for ensuring high availability and resiliency for your open-source IT services, giving you the foundation needed to run open-source solutions with maximum flexibility, availability, and confidence.

For more information on how you can use InfoScale with your open-source IT solutions, check out this whitepaper.  You can also see a quick demo of InfoScale makes it easy to provide high availability for an open-source database.