It's a funny thing, relativity. One man's too-short lunchbreak is another man's eternity. A split second in an accident on the highway can seem longer than an hour-long holdup on the N3 from Durban.
Einstein put it nicely: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
Similarly, downtime is relative. What might be acceptable to one entity would be totally unacceptable to another.
Downtime is such a profound issue as to require a philosophical approach, as is the case with many major business issues.
The reason for this is related to three factors:
* The impact of Metcalfe's Law, which states the power of a network is inversely proportional to the number of nodes connected to it.
* The fact that almost every company of substance today fulfils its processes through digitised systems. This means that in many cases it is impossible separate a company from its systems.
* The increasingly mission-critical nature of the applications which run on today's corporate networks, and by extension, the Internet.
As an example, it has been widely catalogued that the loss of access to e-mail is the single greatest corporate frustration - and that every hour of downtime in today's increasingly connected world can cost a company millions.
And yet corporations of all kinds tolerate downtime:
* Toll booths on the N3 on the way from Durban to Johannesburg, with resulting 17km tailbacks - the reason: "The system is down."
* Queues stretch hundreds of metres at the checkin counters at SA's international airports - the reason: "The system is down."
* It is quite often impossible to order or collect tickets for shows at SA's premier ticketing company - the reason: "The system is down."
* Frequent congestion at checkout points at one of SA's largest hyper stores - the reason: "The system is down."
The consequence in all cases is frustrated customers, drivers, shoppers, passengers, members of the public; the organisations project an image of amateurishness, of lack of foresight and planning; they lose large amounts of money, their supply chains are disrupted, and flights are held up, with consequential knock-on effects.
Consider these documented costs of downtime, in rand lost per hour due to network outages:
Brokerage operations: R41 million
Credit card authorisations: R19 million
ATM fees: R106 000
Tele ticket sales: R524 000
Downtime is such a profound issue as to require a philosophical approach, as is the case with many major business issues.
Raul Garbini is sales director at Edgetec.
In most cases, downtime is avoidable with the requisite planning and system design. It all begins with a mindset intolerant of outages, and here we need to look at a primary cause of downtime today: the widespread, almost ubiquitous use of commodity servers.
There is nothing inherently wrong with commodity servers; however, the generation that has grown up with them has also grown up with Windows on the desktop, and it is patently clear that Windows system administrators do not view servers as being mission-critical. In support of this statement, consider how many times you have seen a billboard advertising display frozen with a Windows error message!
Those with grey hair (or receding hairlines!), who grew up with mainframes and other host-centric systems, such as the System 38 and AS/400-System i, know the importance of uptime and, conversely, the damaging impact of downtime.
These systems were architected for high availability and the engineers and administrators who looked, and in many cases still look, after them have internalised this attribute. They live and breathe high availability, and to them, downtime is non-negotiable.
In this world, many add-ons have been created to ensure that already highly available systems can be enhanced to withstand just about any event.
In this series of Industry Insights, I will look at the impact and potential causes of system outages, and solutions to prevent them. In the next Industry Insight, I will consider the "myths of the nines".
* Raul Garbini is sales director at Edgetec.
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