$5.4 billion! That’s the estimated figure for direct losses to just the Fortune 500 on the fateful day of July 19,2024. It is a day that will be etched in infamy for the technical teams who struggled to make sense of the inexplicable “blue screens of death,” and for the end-users whose lives were severely disrupted by the resulting chaos. The outage rendered online banking inaccessible, stranded travelers at airports worldwide, delayed critical medical procedures, and wreaked havoc on countless other aspects of daily life.
The cause of this outage was traced to a bad update pushed out to CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor product. A bug in CrowdStrike’s automated content validator tool allowed a template containing problematic content data to be approved for delivery over this cloud update, and that ultimately caused around 8.5 million machines running Microsoft Windows to crash and go offline.
A Case for a Cross-Platform Future
Despite “learning experiences” like this one, it’s hard to imagine a world where QA oversights and errant updates are completely eliminated. Software bugs are a fact of life as long as innovation continues to take place, and as software solutions grow more capable and advanced, quality assurance grows ever more challenging to facilitate with 100% confidence. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping enhance testing automation capabilities to improve the quality of software releases, but it’s impossible to reach a level of “absolute” certainty in the realm of software quality assurance.
So, what proactive action can organizations take to prepare themselves to mitigate a disaster like this more efficiently in the future? Imagine a bad update has once again been pushed to all Windows Server devices, rendering them totally inaccessible in an inescapable boot-loop.
DH2i’s answer is embracing cross-platform database environments.
Take Advantage of OS Agnostic HA Failover Clustering
Ever since the advent of SQL Server on Linux with the release of SQL Server 2017, DH2i has fulfilled the critical role of a high availability engine on both platforms. Over the seven years since then, DxEnterprise Smart High Availability Clustering software has introduced features that allow you to manage both platforms completely and cohesively with capabilities like:
- Unified Windows and Linux SQL Server in the same cluster or AG
- Cross-platform failover between Windows and Linux in seconds
- Infrastructure agnostic ZTNA connections from anywhere, to anywhere
Diversifying your IT environment with SQL Server on both Windows and Linux is the most effective action you can take in the wake of the CrowdStrike incident. A mixed Windows and Linux environment combined with the cross-platform clustering and failover capability offered by DH2i adds a critical component to your organization’s outage mitigation toolkit.
In the case of a total failure of Windows Server OS across your organization like that experienced in the CrowdStrike incident, this solution gives your organization the ability to rapidly failover critical application workloads to new Linux hosts while ensuring nearest-to-zero downtime. The built-in zero trust network access (ZTNA) capability ensures that your sensitive data remains completely secure on Linux, Windows, and anywhere in between.
A Win-Win: Protection for Today and Flexibility for Tomorrow
DH2i’s DxEnterprise software is the one-and-only solution to provide OS agnostic failover clustering that ensures high availability for applications across both Windows and Linux. This is a critical capability for organizations to add if they want to avoid falling victim to crippling OS outages like that of the recent CrowdStrike incident.
In addition to providing the only true, cross-platform HA solution for SQL Server on the market, DxEnterprise can also futureproof your organization for the age of containers. SQL Server containers can be easily integrated into clusters side-by-side with Windows and Linux instances, and Availability Groups can be easily deployed in Kubernetes using DxOperator, the industry’s preferred SQL Server Operator for Kubernetes.
If your organization is done relying on a single platform and ready to diversify your database environment with Windows and Linux SQL Server, reach out for a free consultation at [email protected].
Want to see DxEnterprise in action? Take a look at one of our cross-platform demo videos.
If you’re interested in learning more about DH2i’s approach to smart high availability technology, get signed up for a one-on-one demo today.
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