US-based PayGo said it is using SIOS DataKeeper on Amazon Web Services (AWS) utilizing Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual servers with solid-state drive (SSD)-only storage for automatic failover needed to ensure high availability (HA) for the company’s SQL Server applications.

PayGo, an integrated utility payment solution provider, is currently running four production environments in AWS, with another coming online soon, with SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition running on Windows Server 2012 R2. The company has plans to migrate to Windows Server 2019 after testing is completed.

PayGo first installed SIOS DataKeeper SANLess Clustering software in its own private cloud, and later migrated the configuration to AWS. SIOS DataKeeper is said to have met and exceeded PayGo’s high expectations for a high availability solution, including ease of installation and operation, and responsive support.

The IT team at PayGo is currently considering adding DR protection to the HA clusters by deploying a third node in a separate AWS region. The distance involved in this case (between datacenters in Virginia and Ohio) experience a latency of 12-13 ms. While that requires asynchronous replication to ensure high throughput performance in the active node, the combined HA/DR solution would recover much quicker than what is possible with log shipping.