Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 1)

Jerry discusses high availability infrastructures in cloud computing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to the company.

Jerry Melnick: I’m the CEO and President of SIOS. I joined here about two and a half years ago. My background is in the areas of photonic computing and database systems. I came out of a Massachusetts-based startup known as Marathon Technologies. I came to SIOS because of the background that I saw here and the opportunity that was quite unusual and exceptional in terms of the fact that I could see that the product set here had an opportunity to meet a significant number of demands I had heard when I was in the space of photonic computing .

The real value proposition for the high availability offering that SIOS Technology provides is around the ability to be very flexible in terms of the types of high availability app configurations that can be constructed and the relevance in today’s infrastructure. Just to back up a little bit more about SIOS itself, SIOS was originally known as a SteelEye Technology focused on high availability clustering to deliver high level SLAs. The company cut its teeth in its first real enterprise high availability capability for Linux. The company provided solutions for database systems and later Windows and SQL server.

We’ve also launched into some new directions, but it’s really around high availability clustering and Windows clustering. The company was acquired by a publicly held company in Tokyo called SIOS Technology Inc. We’re a wholly-owned subsidiary of that company and I run the operations here. We develop the software and service sales and marketing worldwide.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about what kinds of customers you cater to and let’s double-click down into what you do for them.

Jerry Melnick: The problems we solve for our customers are fundamental to their business whether it’s an accounting system or a business intelligence system. They need to ensure access to that. Should that service fail, their business could lose a lot of money. Two important factors on the top of mind for them are availability of the application and no loss of data.

The third piece, which is high availability quite frankly, is it’s performing according to SLA. An application which is really slow is not really useful. The problems that we solve are for those types of applications. They’re typically database systems. On the back end, I have some kind of relational database or file-based system. Our software allows customers to build systems in a large variety of configuration to meet their needs.

In the availability space, one of the nuances is that there are so many ways to solve availability problems using different technologies. The advantage of our approach is that the application doesn’t really need to know much about what’s going on in the infrastructure. The infrastructure is really managing everything that’s happening in terms of detecting failure, recovering the application, and starting it again. Why is that important? It’s important because it’s very difficult and it’s very expensive to build applications that have that kind of logic built into it and make it robust. By providing a solid platform underneath it using clustering technology, we’re bringing significant value to the customer and providing lower cost and higher assurances for the application.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS
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