Late last week I met Jim Kaskade of SIOS at a Seattle-area Starbucks for a meeting and a product demo. With the very cool (and appropriate) title "Chief of Cloud", Jim was the right person to demonstrate his company's new cloud-powered high availability and disaster recovery solution.

Jim's Mac laptop was running Centos. He used Xen and Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager to host a couple of virtual machines representing the web, application, and database tiers of a SugarCRM installation. Each of the guest operating systems was running a copy of the new SIOS CloudStation product. Each copy of CloudStation was configured (using a web-based GUI) to replicate the state of the virtual machine to an Amazon EC2 instance running in a user-selected Region.

Once everything was up and running, Jim showed me how he could selectively kill the local virtual machines while keeping the application running. The demo was designed to feature a very short RPO (Recovery Point Objective) so that changes made locally just seconds before the database was killed were available from the cloud-based virtual mirror. Jim walked me through a number of different failure and recovery scenarios.

It was quite impressive and makes a great demo of the cloud-based DR (Disaster Recovery) and HA (High Availability) that I've been telling my audiences about for the last couple of years. Once configured, CloudStation can fail over from local processing to the cloud, from one cloud region to another, or even from one cloud provider to another. It can also be used as a migration tool, or what is sometimes calls P2V (Physical to Virtual) or P2C (Physical to Cloud).

Read more in the Solution Brief (PDF) or sign up for the March 24th webinar.

-- Jeff;