Does this sound familiar: your leadership – and customers – expect 24×7 operations. No more downtime. Meanwhile, your Ops and IT teams are overwhelmed maintaining existing systems, patching vulnerabilities, and rolling out updates. And since your business is growing and your cloud strategy has changed, they’re also responding to new business demands in addition to exploring new platform investments.
Last but not least, your disaster recovery SLA is no longer acceptable, and failover for mission-critical B2B operations hasn’t been tested in over a year.
For a growing number of modern enterprises, downtime means lost business. It’s no longer an option.
This is why we’re proud to introduce Axway B2Bi Enterprise Edition: an integrated, enterprise-grade software package that delivers greater capability and business value by delivering an optimized version of our best-of-class B2Bi software as a containerized deployment.
Read on to learn more about how to leverage containerized software for greater availability and resiliency, improved cloud and deployment flexibility, and better business scalability.
Continue to leverage multi-cluster deployments and active/active operations
To be clear, you always have a choice with us. Axway B2Bi Enterprise Edition empowers enterprises with a path to platform modernization that meets your specific business objectives, whether through classic or containerized deployments.
For those who wish to stay the course with traditional installations, options such as active/active clustering and multi-clustering can provide zero downtime maintenance, reliable operations, and business continuity.
Especially when coordinating multiple systems, hardware and software platforms, it can become quite a challenge to find downtime windows for planned maintenance on your B2B Integration environment without impacting critical customers.
Multi-cluster architectures have proven a valuable method for keeping operations going: many enterprises deploy and manage multiple clusters to ensure that workloads can continue when one fails or is taken down intentionally.
There is a growing trend towards operating multiple clusters across more than one geographical region and for utilizing a hybrid deployment strategy (on-prem and cloud). It allows enterprises to isolate workflows where appropriate and scale operations when needed.
Additionally, multiple clusters can work simultaneously in an active/active setup. Active/active ensures that if one node in a cluster fails, another can take over without any disruption in service. When used in a multi-cluster setup, a company is obtaining the most robust architecture possible – whether a single node goes down or the whole cluster does, the architecture ensures that processing occurs as anticipated, and business continues despite the expected – or unexpected – downtime.
By running Axway B2B Integration in a multi-cluster environment in the cloud, logistics giant DB Schenker has been able to eliminate some 40 hours of maintenance downtime per year, helping them deliver round-the-clock services to global customers.
European energy supplier Equinor has also experienced great success with a multi-cluster setup for high availability – it is giving them greater agility to balance fluctuating demands for natural gas as temperatures change, for example.
Future-proof B2B integrations with containers
The majority of enterprises have their eye on the horizon and are watching advancements in cloud computing to prepare themselves for future opportunities.
Whether those opportunities consist of where to make additional infrastructure investments, upgrade middleware, shift to cloud or go hybrid, every company is interested in business continuity. And if such also provides the opportunity to optimize resources and maybe reduce costs, then all the better.
Containers provide that opportunity, and the market reflects this:
- 86% of IT leaders view expanding the use of containers as a top priority
- 90% of organizations say they rely on containers and related technologies for a significant portion, or nearly all, of their cloud-native application development and deployment.
Why the drive for containers? Because of the enterprise-level value they can provide:
- Eliminating downtime: a failed container is isolated by default from other instances and the underlying infrastructure which is one means to avoid downtime, and more importantly, this means applying system maintenance and updates are never a problem.
- Rapidly deployed: with container orchestration, a company can deploy additional instances in minutes since the dependency on OS and other resources is not applicable.
- Able to scale to demand: rapid deployment also means new containers can be spun up to handle additional workloads in response to both planned and unplanned throughput.
- Fully protected: container isolation and packaging protect applications from threats by minimizing opportunities for them to occur.
Dive deeper: Cloud Containers [Discover What, Why & How They Work]
If you are seeking true zero downtime, high scalability, and more efficient deployment that’s tailored for both cloud and on-premise deployments, containers may be the best option for your enterprise.
And with B2Bi Enterprise Edition, we have refactored components of our software into logical services that are well-suited for a containerized deployment.
This is important because it’s difficult to leverage the true power of containers if a monolithic application isn’t properly optimized for a container deployment. Not that it can’t be done, but rest assured we did it the right way with B2Bi.
Modernize your B2Bi integration and prepare to scale with B2Bi Enterprise Edition
Simply put, Axway B2Bi Enterprise Edition helps support a more robust architecture, providing business continuity without impacting the quality or functionality of your operations. And it will deliver benefits whether you choose a classic installation or a containerized one.
Stop wasting time with maintenance and updates, accommodate real-time throughput changes, and get ready to scale for future growth in the cloud or on premises.
Learn how to unlock the power of containers with Axway B2Bi Enterprise Edition.