Ensuring High Availability for SLED Organizations with Robust Cluster Solutions

⇨ SLED organizations must integrate advanced technology solutions to maintain efficient service delivery despite budget constraints and staffing shortages.

⇨ High availability (HA) systems are critical in the SLED sector, particularly for emergency services and educational institutions, to ensure seamless communication and operational continuity.

⇨ Implementing solutions like SIOS’s SANless cluster can significantly enhance system resilience and performance, minimizing downtime and improving overall user satisfaction.

Just like any other business, organizations within the state, local government and education (SLED) sector must be up-to-date with the progress in technology to be able to provide immediate service and support. SLED organizations are the foundational pillars of our society and include areas like schooling and university, thorough police regulation, and emergency services.

With the continuous restrictions on budget, time and staff shortage, it is, of course, not an easy task to keep service and support levels at a constant high. So, technology experts are coming up with solutions, designed for the SLED sector to ensure that its functions are operating efficiently and without defects. Among them is SIOS, the provider of high availability (HA) cluster software for cloud and on-premise systems.

Sharing more about the solutions that SIOS offers for SLED, Dave Bermingham, SIOS director of customer success, discussed the company’s provision of high availability solutions in a webinar, “SIOS: Providing High Availability Solutions to the SLED Market”.

For large SLED organizations, efficiency is essential

Considering that businesses within the SLED industry are known to consist of multiple departments and, therefore, often encompass a variety of different technologies, they need to develop an efficient and streamlined flow of operations across the whole sector.

“If I pick up the phone and call 911, I expect someone to be on the other end to not only be able to take that call, but to efficiently dispatch services for whatever emergency it might be, ambulance, police or whatnot,” Bermingham said. “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.

“[…] That’s all part of business continuity disaster recovery: making sure all those systems flow. So, you need to take into consideration all those systems that make our local government function and make sure that they are highly available.”

Additionally, Bermingham explained that it is vital for systems and technology in SLED to work efficiently for the image of the business itself, especially in education, if your organization’s systems, like Blackboard or Outlook, are not operating properly, this can hinder the experience of not just current students who are already paying tuition, but also prospective students, looking into applying for your university. Therefore, system continuity and HA can be critical for the success of the business and overall end user satisfaction.

How SLED organizations were helped in the past

When thinking about developing HA across your tech stack, it can be helpful to learn about examples of how this has been realized in the industry in the past. Thus, Bermingham shared how one of SIOS’s customers, an educational institution, was looking for a solution that could help improve its enrollment system. Specifically, the organization needed its system to be able to withstand any downtime and even the failure of an entire data center. Therefore, the decision was to implement SIOS’s SANless cluster solution that could help it achieve that goal.

The SANless cluster solution protects applications like SAP in local data storage configurations and provides high-performance, low-latency block-level replication with minimal overhead. By opting for this solution, the organization achieved its goals and improved its enrollment system with a comprehensive clustering solution that ensured high availability for it even in the cases of failure.

What emerged from the webinar was the idea that it is recommended for SLED organizations to consider whether their systems are highly available and whether there is room for improvement. If it is determined that there is, solution providers like SIOS are waiting to help.