People often equate high availability with redundancy. While redundancy in particular, and technology in general, are necessary components of a highly-available information technology environment, they are hardly sufficient. Here’s a broader perspective on achieving high availability in enterprise-class systems based on the real-world experiences of IBM’s High Availability Center of Competency.
People often equate high availability with redundancy. While redundancy in particular, and technology in general, are necessary components of a highly-available information technology environment, they are hardly sufficient. Here’s a broader perspective on achieving high availability in enterprise-class systems based on the real-world experiences of IBM’s High Availability Center of Competency.
Scott D. Epter, Ph. D.
In the experience of IBM’s High Availability Center of Competency (HACoC), availability requires much more than simple redundancy. HACoC has conducted many customer outage studies, and, typically, an appreciable percentage of outage minutes aren’t unavoidable. (Unavoidable outage minutes are considered those where the underlying root cause is a failure in technology, such as hardware, software, storage, and so on, that couldn’t have been prevented or automatically mitigated quickly enough to avoid downtime. Avoidable failures are everything else.) In fact, a great many outages could either have been prevented or resolved quickly, avoiding perceptible interruption of service. Avoidable often implies that outage minutes were either caused by human error, mismanagement, or by somebody “just being human.”
The singular purpose of information technology (IT) is to deliver services, such as Web pages, files, ATM transactions, weather forecasts, supply-chain logistics, and more. Thus, availability is only meaningful if it facilitates the successful delivery of a service. For example, when an ATM machine is unable to dispense cash, your customer doesn’t care if your hardware…
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