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InfoScale and Azure Integration

matthewyee
Level 2
Employee

This blog entry is a follow-up to Bobski’s introduction to InfoScale in Azure. This is a low-level overview of how InfoScale integrates into Azure via its Agents. If you are interested in more details, you can view the Veritas white paper: InfoScale on Azure: Integration and Implementation.  

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise is a market leader in software-defined storage, workload resiliency, and disaster recovery. Veritas InfoScale Enterprise natively supports the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service. This means all the features of InfoScale found on bare metal and hypervisor-based systems are also available on Azure.

One might ask: If I’m already paying for the resiliency features common to a cloud environment, why would I use InfoScale there?

Running all your IT infrastructure in public clouds doesn’t eliminate the risk of downtime or data loss. Public clouds can indeed help minimize the risk of all those things and provide a robust facility for automation. Still, it isn’t unheard of for public clouds to lose data. A public cloud also doesn’t necessarily reduce the risk of downtime due to user error (like fat fingering a configuration file).

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise helps minimize these risks and mitigate single points of failure created by a cloud environment, to keep your application up and running.

Where InfoScale is Used

Organizations can use InfoScale Enterprise and Azure integration to build a resilient infrastructure within Azure, or one that allows on-premises systems to fail over and replicate to Microsoft Azure. It is also possible to design a topology that enables infrastructure to fail over and replicate between Microsoft Azure and other public clouds. InfoScale can also be used to migrate data from on-premises systems to public clouds like Azure. For more information, please see Veritas InfoScale: Managing Mission Critical Applications in a Software-defined Data Center.

There are many other advantages to running InfoScale to optimize your applications and storage in Azure. You can read about them in the following documents:

How InfoScale and Azure work together

To simplify the configuration of high availability, Veritas InfoScale Enterprise ships with an array of agents that integrate into various third-party applications. Agents explicitly written to integrate with Microsoft Azure are included. Integration with Azure means being able to conduct operations such as provisioning disk, registering IPs with DNS, or provisioning VMs with RESTful APIs.

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise provides agents that bind to Azure RESTful APIs to enable operations that make your applications highly available. For example, given you have two nodes in an InfoScale cluster in Azure. The expectation is that if one node fails, your enterprise service will failover to the second node to maintain availability. The InfoScale Agents which integrate with Azure resources such as Disk, IP, and DNS would be disconnected from the failed node and reconnected to the failover node. When your failed node recovers, InfoScale can reconnect these resources.

  1. InfoScale and Azure.pngInfoScale Enterprise is running on 2 Azure Virtual Machines, providing high availability to an enterprise application. A fault occurs.
  2. The InfoScale Enterprise Intelligent Monitoring Framework detects the fault and initiates a failover operation.
  3. The failover operation varies between applications; however, the overarching principle is to attempt to restart the service on the original node. If that is not possible, the application will be failed over to a remaining node.
  4. Additional resources such as virtual IP addresses, external DNS mapping, and storage will be disconnected from the failed node and reconnected to the secondary node. The InfoScale Agents for Azure do this by authenticating with Azure and sending subsequent RESTful API calls to perform the required operations to disconnect and reconnect resources.
  5. The application is successfully restored to service with the required resources so that there is minimal interruption to clients.

Then, you can organize InfoScale’s integration points with Azure into groups of resources, allowing you to configure your applications to be associated with your Azure disk, IP, and DNS resources. When a resource in a resource group fails, InfoScale can initiate a failover operation to a secondary node or standby cluster in a different Azure region (or anywhere else!) See section 3.1 in Veritas InfoScale: Managing Mission Critical Applications in a Software-defined Data Center for more information on how InfoScale Availability works.

Summary

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise and Azure integration helps customers build resilient, performant, and highly available infrastructures that minimize interruption to business-critical services and applications. Azure provides a resilient physical infrastructure. Your business can benefit from Veritas InfoScale Enterprise by ensuring that your applications run uninterrupted.