High availability infrastructure has traditionally been defined as a set of hardware and software solutions that maintain their uptime for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days per year.
As the business landscape has changed, so the definition of availability has evolved to meet the new business requirements. Availability is no longer simply 24/7/365 - it is now defined as whatever the business wants.
While the 24/7/365 (continuous availability) definition was perfectly suitable for companies transitioning to the 'Internet age' about a decade ago, businesses today are using their IT assets to complement their existing business strategies. Availability doesn't simply mean 'always up' to these companies, it means 'definitely up when it needs to be'.
While many organisations really do require continuous availability from their computer systems, more and more companies require their computer systems to only be available for specific periods of time, sometimes even only a few hours a week. While their requirement is only a few hours, the importance of their availability is often higher.
Dick Sharod, country manager of Stratus South Africa, purveyors of the world's most reliable and available server infrastructures says that, where over the past couple of years uptime and availability were measured over the entire lifetime of a system, today uptime and availability are measured by whatever the customer wants - be it continuous or specific.
"Ironically enough, for businesses that only require uptime and availability during specific windows of time, the potential cost of downtime is far higher," says Sharod.
The common misperception for companies like this is that they don't need an availability solution for only a few hours a day or week, but the reverse is in fact true - it is more important for them to have 100% availability during the times that they define. This can be proven by examining the costs associated with unplanned downtime (a crash). For a company that absolutely needs to be 'always up', their availability solution is designed to allow them to make money at any time of the day. The direct cost of an hour's unplanned downtime for a company like this is roughly their day's revenue divided by 24 - just over 4% of their daily revenue.
While their income does vary depending on the time of day, even a crash during their busiest hour is still a fraction of their day's total income. For many companies this can be a massive cost, which is why they wisely invest in an availability solution that won't go down.
However, for the company that makes it's entire day's revenue in the space of one critical hour, the cost of unplanned downtime is catastrophic! For this company, unplanned downtime by definition only happens during their critical hour and if the system goes down during that time, the cost of that one hour's downtime is 100% of their day's revenue. It's easy to see how, in situations like this, an availability solution is mandatory.
Sharod says this is significant, since it blows a common misperception out of the water. "Most businesses that aren't 24/7 operations believe that they don't have a strong requirement for high-availability servers because they're not an 'always on' business. I would argue that often their need is even stronger," he says.
By extending this point logically, Sharod says businesses with even smaller business windows than 'normal business hours' are the most at risk from downtime. "Take the cellular network partner for programmes such as 'Idols' or 'Big Brother', popular reality television shows that have taken the world by storm.
"Every week viewers have a limited time to vote a housemate out of the 'Big Brother' house, or ensure their favourite 'Idols' participant lasts another week in the competition. Every minute their systems are down during this 'voting window' not only cripples their programme, but since this is a major source of revenue for them, it can have a potentially crippling effect on their profitability.
"While their business windows are small, their requirement for uptime and availability is massive," he says. "Every minute of downtime is proportionally a much larger portion of lost revenues."
The good news for these businesses is, however, that high-availability solutions need not break the bank. As the market for availability has grown, so the price of true availability solutions has come down. "At the current price, and considering the potential costs, most find they can't afford not to build reliability, resilience and availability into their business offerings," he concludes.
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