Continuous Availability
Continuous Availability Keeping Critical Applications Always On
The reality in today’s businesses, small and large, is that downtime of vital applications can have severe impact on business operations. This leads to customer dissatisfaction, loss of productivity, reputation damage and revenue loss.
Planning for Continuous Availability of applications without which the business cannot function should be top of the IT agenda. The most critical systems include Windows Applications such as email, collaboration and database systems; Mobility platforms such a BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and those deployed on virtual platforms such as VMware and Hyper-V . In all cases the threat of downtime is constant.
Application, system and network failure may cause unplanned outages. Routine and emergency maintenance on system components, power supplies or air-conditioning may require pro-active shutdown.
For some areas of the world preparing for hurricanes or the threat of flood may mean emergency shutdown. In all of these situations Continuous Availability of service can make all the difference.
Traditional approaches to High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) fall short of today’s demands. HA tools such as clusters, whether physical or virtual, are vulnerable to SAN, power and environmental failures. DR typically relies on data storage focused tools such as replication and backup which have no ability to detect if an application has failed and depend on human intervention to bring functionality back on-line with inevitable delays in resumption of service.
Continuous Availability brings automation, monitoring, application management and replication together with a focus on maintaining user connectivity to critical applications. The result is the user is isolated from the impact of IT downtime to ensure no business downtime even if an IT system or a virtual machine must be shutdown.
